Abstract
Background: The choice of anesthesia technique remains debatable in patients undergoing surgical repair of hip fracture. This meta-analysis was performed to compare the effect of neuraxial (epidural/spinal) versus general anesthesia on perioperative outcomes in patients undergoing hip fracture surgery.Methods: Medline, Cochrane Library, Science-Direct, and EMBASE databases were searched to identify eligible studies focused on the comparison between neuraxial and general anesthesia in hip fracture patients between January 2000 and May 2019. Perioperative outcomes were extracted for systemic analysis. The sensitivity analyses were performed by the leave-one-out approach. The evidence quality for each outcome was evaluated by the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) system.Results: Nine randomized controlled trials (RCTs) including 1084 patients fulfilled our selection criteria. The results showed that there were no significant differences in the 30-day mortality (OR = 1.34, 95% CI 0.56, 3.21; P = 0.51), length of stay (MD = -0.65, 95% CI -0.32, 0.02; P =0.06), and the prevalence of delirium (OR = 1.05, 95% CI 0.27, 4.00; P = 0.95), acute myocardial infarction (OR = 0.88, 95% CI 0.17, 4.65; P = 0.88), deep venous thrombosis (OR = 0.48, 95% CI 0.09, 2.72; P = 0.41), and pneumonia (OR = 1.04, 95% CI 0.23, 4.61; P = 0.96) for neuraxial anesthesia compared to general anesthesia. There was a significant difference in terms of blood loss in favor of the neuraxial anesthesia (MD = -137.8, 95% CI -241.49, -34.12; p = 0.009). The evidence quality for each outcome evaluated by the GRADE system was low.Conclusions: In summary, our present study demonstrated that neuraxial anesthesia is associated with a reduced blood loss in patients undergoing hip fracture surgery compared to general anesthesia. However, this result was underpowered. Due to small sample size and enormous inconsistency in the choice of outcome measures, more high-quality studies with large sample size are needed to clarify this issue
Defining modes of anaesthesia: response to ‘Perioperative outcomes in the context of mode of anaesthesia for patients undergoing hip fracture surgery: systematic review and meta-analysis’
