A meta-analysis of comparisons of various surgical treatments for moyamoya diseases

Ischemia is one of the most familiar complications in the different procedures for moyamoya disease (MMD), but the optimal surgical approaches for MMD remain unknown. We aimed to evaluate the efficiency of various surgical treatments.

A literature search word was performed through four databases such as Cochrane Library, Web of Science, PubMed, and EMBASE for the literature published until May 2021. The I² statistic was used to assess heterogeneity. A random/fixed-effects model was used to pool.

There are a total of 18 studies including three surgical treatments such as including indirect, direct, and combined bypass in this study. The result revealed that indirect bypass was related to a higher incidence of recurrence stroke compared to the direct and combined bypass treatment (p = .001). Furthermore, the cases undergoing direct bypass were associated with a better angiographic change than the indirect bypass (OR = 3.254, p = .013).

This meta-analysis demonstrated a positive effect of using the direct and combined bypass to treat MMD compared to indirect bypass due to their lower rates of recurrence stroke.