Efficacy and safety of remote ischemic conditioning for acute ischemic stroke: A comprehensive meta‐analysis from randomized controlled trials

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Remote ischemic conditioning (RIC) is a remote, transient, and noninvasive procedure providing temporary ischemia and reperfusion. However, there is no comprehensive literature investigating the efficacy and safety of RIC for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke. In the present study, we performed a comprehensive meta‐analysis of the available studies. METHODS: MEDLINE, Embase, the Cochrane Library database (CENTRAL), and ClinicalTrials.gov were searched before Sep 7, 2022. The data were analyzed using Review Manager 5.4.1 software, Stata version 16.0 software, and R 4.2.0 software. Odds ratio (OR), mean difference (MD), and corresponding 95% CIs were pooled using fixed‐effects meta‐analysis. RESULTS: We pooled 6392 patients from 17 randomized controlled trials. Chronic RIC could reduce the recurrence of ischemic stroke at the endpoints (OR 0.67, 95% CI [0.51, 0.87]). RIC could also improve the prognosis of patients at 90 days as assessed by mRS score (mRS 0–1: OR 1.29, 95% CI [1.09, 1.52]; mRS 0–2: OR 1.22, 95% CI [1.01, 1.48]) and at the endpoints assessed by NIHSS score (MD −0.99, 95% CI [−1.45, −0.53]). RIC would not cause additional adverse events such as death (p = 0.72), intracerebral hemorrhage events (p = 0.69), pneumonia (p = 0.75), and TIA (p = 0.24) but would inevitably cause RIC‐related adverse events (OR 26.79, 95% CI [12.08, 59.38]). CONCLUSIONS: RIC could reduce the stroke recurrence and improve patients' prognosis. Intervention on bilateral upper limbs, 5 cycles, and a length of 50 min in each intervention might be an optimal protocol for RIC at present. RIC could be an effective therapy for patients not eligible for reperfusion therapy. RIC would not cause other adverse events except for relatively benign RIC‐related adverse events.