Safety and efficacy for laparoscopic versus open hepatectomy: A meta-analysis

Laparoscopic hepatectomy (LH) is growing in popularity, but its efficacy and safety are still controversial. Few multicenter, large, population-based, prospective, randomized studies have compared LH with open hepatectomy (OH). We performed a meta-analysis to compare the treatment outcome of patients undergoing LH versus OH. We searched PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Central Register, CNKI, and WanFang Med Online databases to November 30th, 2016 for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compared treatment outcome for LH and OH. Eligibility criteria included evaluation of operation time, blood loss, complications, and hospital stay after surgery for adult patients who underwent LH or OH. Reviewers in pairs independently screened the studies, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies. Agreement was achieved. RevMan 5.3 was used to conduct meta-analysis. Complete case analysis was used as primary analysis. Predefined subgroup analysis includes benign and malignant disease. Eight RCTs with a total of 554 patients were included in the meta-analysis, 275 types of LH and 279 types of OH. LH reduced the hospital stay after surgery (8 trials, 554 patients, MD = −3.84 days, 95%CI: −5.05 to −2.63, P