Background: When conventional endoscopic treatment of bile duct stones is impossible or fails, advanced endoscopy-assisted lithotripsy can be performed by electrohydraulic lithotripsy (EHL), laser lithotripsy, or extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL). No systematic review has compared efficacy and safety between these techniques.
Methods: A systematic search was performed in PubMed, the Cochrane Library, and EMBASE for studies investigating EHL, laser lithotripsy, and ESWL in patients with retained biliary tract stones.
Results: After screening 795 studies, 32 studies with 1969 patients undergoing EHL (n = 277), laser lithotripsy (n = 426) or ESWL (n = 1266) were included. No randomized studies were available. Although each advanced lithotripsy technique appeared to be highly effective, laser lithotripsy had a higher complete ductal clearance rate (95.1 %) than EHL (88.4 %) and ESWL (84.5 %; P < 0.001). In addition, a higher stone fragmentation rate was reported for laser lithotripsy (92.5 %) than for EHL (75.5 %) and ESWL (89.3 %; P < 0.001). The post-procedural complication rate was significantly higher for patients treated with EHL (13.8 %) than for patients treated with ESWL (8.4 %) or laser lithotripsy (9.6 %; P = 0.04). Data on the recurrence rate of the biliary tract stones were lacking.
Conclusion: This systematic review revealed that laser lithotripsy appeared to be the most successful advanced endoscopy-assisted lithotripsy technique for retained biliary tract stones, although randomized studies are lacking.
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