Objective: Following compelling evidence that open techniques may be related to better survival and disease free survival rates, many gynecologic oncologists in the US have turned away from performing laparoscopic radical hysterectomy (LRH) and robotic radical hysterectomy (RRH) for the treatment of early-stage cervical cancer. While this may be warranted as a safety concern, there is little high-quality data on the head-to-head comparison of LRH and RRH and therefore little evidence to answer the question of where this decrease in patient survival is originating from. In our systematic review, we aimed to compare the complications and outcomes of LRH against those of RRH.
Data sources: We searched PubMed, Cochrane CENTRAL, Medline, ClinicalTrials.Gov, SCOPUS, and Web of Science from database inception until February 1st, 2022.
Methods of study selection: A total of 676 studies were identified and screened through a manual three-step process. Ultimately 33 studies were included in our final analysis. We included all studies that compared LRH and RRH and included at least one of our selected outcomes. We included retrospective cohorts, prospective cohorts, case-control, and randomized clinical trials.
Tabulation, integration, and results: Data was independently extracted manually by multiple observers and the analysis was performed using Review Manager Software. PRISMA guidelines were followed. We analyzed homogenous data using a fixed-effects model, while a random-effects model was used for heterogeneous outcomes. We found that following RRH, women had a decreased hospital stay (MD = 0.80[0.38,1.21],(P < 0.002). We found no differences in estimated blood loss (MD = 35.24[-0.40,70.89],(P = 0.05), blood transfusion rate ((OR = 1.32[0.86,2.02],(P = 0.20), rate of post-operative complications (OR = 0.84[0.60,1.17],(P = 0.30), the operative time (MD = 6.01[-4.64,16.66],(P = 0.27), number of resected lymph node (MD = -1.22[-3.28,0.84],(P = 0.25) intraoperative complications (OR = 0.78[0.51,1.19],(P = 0.25), five-year overall survival (OR = 1.37[0.51,3.69],(P = 0.53), lifetime disease free survival (OR = 0.89[0.59,1.32],(P = 0.55), intraoperative and postoperative mortality (within 30 days) (OR = 1.30[0.66,2.54],(P = 0.44), and recurrence (OR = 1.14[0.79,1.64],(P = 0.50).
Conclusions: RRH seems to result in the patient leaving the hospital sooner after surgery. We were unable to find any differences in our ten other outcomes related to complications or efficacy. These findings suggest that the decreased survival seen in minimally invasive RH in previous studies could be due to factors inherent to both LRH and RRH.
Prospero prospective registration number: CRD42022273727.
Keywords: Hysterectomy; Laparoscopic radical hysterectomy; Robotic radical hysterectomy.
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