Purpose: The best treatment strategy for primary spontaneous pneumothorax is controversial and varies widely in practice.
Methods: Literatures were searched from databases till 24 August 2021. A Bayesian network meta-analysis was conducted to compare the outcomes of various treatments with the following endpoints: recurrence rate, postoperative chest tube duration, postoperative air leakage duration, length of hospital stay, and complications rate.
Results: In all, 7210 patients of 20 randomized controlled trials and 17 cohort studies were included. Surgery had a significantly lower recurrence rate compared to other treatments. Besides, bullectomy (BT) combined with chemical pleurodesis (CP), mechanical pleurodesis, or staple line coverage (SLC) can reduce the recurrence rate compared to BT alone, but none of them were statistically significant. In terms of reducing chest tube duration, BT with tubular Neoveil outperformed BT + pleural abrasion (mean difference [MD], 95% confidence interval [CI]: -2.5 [-4.63, -0.35]) and BT + apical pleurectomy (MD, 95% CI: -2.72 [-5.16, -0.27]).
Conclusions: Surgical methods were superior to manual aspiration (MA), chest tube drainage (CTD), and conservative treatment in terms of recurrence reduction. There was no significant difference between MA and CTD in reducing the recurrence rate. Among surgical methods, CP is more effective than mechanical pleurodesis and SLC among the additional procedures based on BT.
Keywords: network meta-analysis; primary spontaneous pneumothorax; recurrence; systematic review.