Regional versus General Anesthesia for Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy: A Meta-Analysis

To compare the effectiveness and safety of regional anesthesia (RA) and general anesthesia (GA) for percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PNL). PubMed, EMBASE, The Cochrane Library, and the Web of Knowledge databases were systematically searched to identify relevant studies. After literature screening and data extraction, a meta-analysis was performed using the RevMan 5.3 software. Eight randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and six non-randomized controlled trials (nRCTs) involving 2270 patients were included. Patients receiving RA were associated with shorter operative time (-6.22 min; 95%CI, -9.70 to -2.75; p = 0.0005), lower visual analgesic score on the first and third postoperative day (WMD, -2.62; 95%CI, -3.04 to -2.19; p < 0.00001 WMD, -0.38; 95%CI, -0.58 to -0.18; p = 0.0002), less analgesic requirements (WMD, -59.40 mg; 95%CI, -78.39 to -40.40; p