Endovascular Treatment of Ruptured Intracranial Blister Aneurysms: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Endovascular treatment of blister aneurysms is a promising approach, even though they are vascular lesions challenging to treat due to their angioarchitectural characteristics.

Our aim was to investigate clinical and radiologic outcomes after endovascular treatment of ruptured blister aneurysms.

PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid EMBASE, Scopus, and the Web of Science were screened.

We performed a comprehensive review of the literature from 2010 to 2019 reporting series of patients with blister aneurysms treated with an endovascular approach.

Event rates were pooled across studies using a random effects meta-analysis.

A total of 32 studies reporting on 684 patients (707 aneurysms) were included. Stent placement, stent-assisted coiling, and flow diversion were the most commonly described treatments (282, 256, and 155 patients, respectively). The long-term complete occlusion rate was 76.9% (95% CI, 69.2%-83.9%). The perioperative complication rate was 8.9%, and clinical outcome at final follow-up was mRS <2 in 76.6% (95% CI, 68.2%-84.2%) of patients. The mortality rate was 4.7% (95% CI, 2.30%-7.80%). Among the different techniques, stent-assisted coiling is the one that had the higher rate of immediate occlusion (63.4%); however, the occlusion rate at the final follow-up was comparable among the different techniques.

Different techniques were described and data were reported in a nonhomogeneous way, possibly representing a bias in the present study.

This study suggests that endovascular treatment of blister aneurysms is associated with good long-term occlusion rates and reasonable complication and mortality rates. There is no consensus on the best endovascular techniques in blister aneurysm management.