Clinical Utility of Presacral Neurectomy as an Adjunct to Conservative Endometriosis Surgery: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Controlled Studies

The objective of this review was to compare the efficacy and safety of conservative surgery with or without adjunctive presacral neurectomy (PN) for chronic endometriosis-related pelvic pain. In a systematic review with meta-analysis, randomized or nonrandomized controlled studies of conservative endometriosis surgery with or without adjunctive PN were included. Main outcomes were treatment failure (the proportion of women in which surgery failed to adequately resolve midline pain) and the frequency of operative and postoperative complications. A total of 7 studies with 8 group comparisons (3 randomized) representing 503 women (250 PN; 253 Control) were included. Over 34 months median follow-up, crude rates of treatment failure were 15.0% with PN and 40.9% with Controls (risk ratio = 0.43, 95% CI = 0.30 to 0.60, p < 0.001). The risk of postoperative constipation was higher with PN vs. Controls (12.5% vs. 0%, p = 0.024). No treatment group differences were observed for the risk of operative complications (0.6% vs. 0%, p = 0.498), reoperation (4.1% vs. 3.0%, p = 0.758) or urinary incontinence (5.0% vs. 0%, p = 0.195). Overall, in well-selected patients, conservative surgery with adjunctive PN may provide greater relief from midline pain and a similarly low rate of operative complications relative to conservative surgery alone but may increase the risk of constipation postoperatively. However, results were derived from mainly older and lower quality studies. Since then, surgical techniques to treat endometriosis have been improved and the effect of PN observed in prior studies should be confirmed in future studies in women in whom radical excision of deep infiltrating lesions is obtained.