Comparative Efficacy of Neuraxial and General anesthesia for hip fracture surgery: A meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials

Background: The choice of anesthesia technique remains debatable in patients undergoing surgical repair of hip fracture. This meta-analysis was performed to compare the effect of neuraxial (epidural/spinal) versus general anesthesia on perioperative outcomes in patients undergoing hip fracture surgery. Methods: Medline, Cochrane Library, Science-Direct, and EMBASE databases were searched to identify eligible studies focused on the comparison between neuraxial and general anesthesia in hip fracture patients between January 2000 and May 2019. Perioperative outcomes were extracted for systemic analysis. The sensitivity analyses were performed by the leave-one-out approach. The evidence quality for each outcome was evaluated by the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) system. Results: Nine randomized controlled trials (RCTs) including 1084 patients fulfilled our selection criteria. The results showed that there were no significant differences in the 30-day mortality, length of stay, and the prevalence of delirium, acute myocardial infarction, and pneumonia for neuraxial anesthesia compared to general anesthesia. There was a significant difference in terms of blood loss in favor of the neuraxial anesthesia. The evidence quality for each outcome evaluated by the GRADE system was low. Conclusions: In summary, our present study demonstrated that neuraxial anesthesia is significantly superior to general anesthesia regarding blood loss in patients undergoing hip fracture surgery. Due to small sample size and enormous inconsistency in the choice of outcome measures, more high-quality studies with large sample size are needed to to clarify this issue.