Laparoscopic Versus Abdominal Radical Hysterectomy for Cervical Cancer: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Laparoscopic radical hysterectomy (LRH) and open abdominal radical hysterectomy (ARH) have been used for cervical cancer treatment. We aimed to perform a meta-analysis to compare the efficacy and safety of LRH and ARH in the treatment of cervical cancer to provide reliable evidence to the clinical cervical cancer treatment. METHODS: Two investigators independently searched PubMed and other databases for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing LRH and ARH for cervical cancer treatment up to May 31, 2022. The risk of bias assessment tool recommended by Cochrane library was used for quality assessment. RevMan 5.3 software was used for meta-analysis. RESULTS: Fourteen RCTs with a total of 1700 patients with cervical cancer were finally included. Meta-analyses indicated that compared with ARH, LRH reduced the intraoperative blood loss (mean difference [MD]=−58.08; 95% CI, −70.91, −45.24), the time to first passage of flatus (MD=−14.50; 95% CI, −16.55, −12.44) (all P<0.05), and increase the number of lymph nodes removed (MD=3.47; 95% CI, 0.51, 6.43; P=0.02). There were no significant differences in the duration of surgery (MD=27.62; 95% CI, −6.26, 61.49), intraoperative complications (odd ratio [OR]=1.10; 95% CI, 0.17, 7.32), postoperative complications (OR=0.78; 95% CI, 0.33, 1.86), relapse rate (OR=1.45; 95% CI, 0.56, 3.74), and survival rate (OR=0.75; 95% CI, 0.52, 1.08) between LRH group and ARH group (all P>0.05). CONCLUSIONS: LRH has more advantages over ARH in the treatment of cervical cancer. Still, the long-term effects and safety of LRH and ARH need more high-quality, large-sample RCTs to be further verified.