The influence of minimally invasive esophagectomy versus open esophagectomy on postoperative pulmonary function in esophageal cancer patients: a meta-analysis

OBJECTIVE: To compare the influence of minimally invasive esophagectomy (MIE) and open esophagectomy (OE) on postoperative pulmonary function in patients with esophageal cancer. METHODS: Studies about the influence of MIE and OE on postoperative pulmonary function in esophageal cancer patients were searched from PubMed, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, CNKI, Chinese Science and Technology Journal Database, CBM, and Wanfang Data from inception to March 18, 2021. Meta-analysis was performed using the RevMan 5.3. RESULTS: This analysis included eight studies, enrolling 264 patients who underwent MIE and 257 patients who underwent OE. The meta-analysis results showed that the MIE group had a higher outcome regarding the percent predicted vital capacity (%VC), forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV(1)), and maximum voluntary ventilation (MVV) 1 month after surgery than the OE group. In addition, those who underwent MIE had lower ΔVC%, ΔFVC, and ΔFEV(1) between pre-operation and 1 month after surgery than those who underwent OE. There is no statistical difference between the two groups in ΔMVV. CONCLUSION: Compared with OE, MIE has a more protective effect on postoperative pulmonary function. However, due to the small number of included literature and all cohort studies, this finding needs to be validated with larger samples and higher quality RCT studies.