Transversus abdominis plane block for postoperative analgesia after laparoscopic surgery: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: The increasing use of the transversus abdominis plane (TAP) block, as a form of pain relief after laparoscopic surgery, warrants evaluation of its effectiveness, when compared with other analgesic techniques.

Methods: We searched online databases of MEDLINE, EMBASE, Google scholar and The Cochrane Database of Systematic Review. Mean differences (MD) were formulated for continuous data; odds ratios (OR) were calculated for dichotomous data.