Background: To carry out a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature to determine whether different type of surgery induces different depression occurrence in female breast cancer at mean time more than 1-year term postoperatively.
Methods: A systematic literature search of PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE, OvidSP, EBSCO and PsycARTICLES was conducted. Observational clinical studies that compared the depression incidence in different surgery groups and presented empirical findings were selected.
Results: Sixteen studies met the inclusion criteria, including 5, 4, 2 and 5 studies compared depression between total mastectomy (TM) and breast conserving therapy (BCS), TM and breast reconstruction (BR), BCS and BR, or among all three groups (TM, BCS and BR), respectively. Only 1 of 5 studies, which subjected to multivariate analysis of depression in female breast cancer, reported a statistically significant effect of type of surgery on depression occurrence. Our meta-analysis showed no significant differences among the three types of surgery, with BCS patients versus TM patients (relative risk [RR] = 0.89, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.78-1.01; P = 0.06), BR patients versus TM patients (RR = 0.87, 95% CI 0.71-1.06; P = 0.16) and BCS patients versus BR patients (RR = 1.10; 95% CI 0.89-1.35; P = 0.37), respectively.
Conclusions: Our study showed that there were no statistically significant differences concerning the occurrence of depressive symptoms in breast cancer patients as a consequence of TM, BCS or BR at mean time more than 1-year term postoperatively.