General anesthesia versus conscious sedation in mechanical thrombectomy for patients with acute ischemic stroke: systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background:  After recently published randomized clinical trials, the choice of the best anesthetic procedure for mechanical thrombectomy (MT) in acute ischemic stroke (AIS) due to large vessel occlusion (LVO) is not definite.

Objective:  To compare the efficacy and safety of general anesthesia (GA) conscious sedation (CS) in patients with AIS who underwent MT, explicitly focusing on procedural and clinical outcomes and the incidence of adverse events.

Methods:  PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane were systematically searched for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing GA CS in patients who underwent MT due to LVO-AIS.