Meta-analysis: the comparison of clinical results between vaginal and laparoscopic myomectomy.

Purpose: To evaluate the clinical results of vaginal myomectomy and laparoscopic myomectomy (LM).

Methods: The database of PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, ProQuest, Cochrane library and China Biological Medicine Database (CBM), Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang (Chinese) and VIP (Chinese) were searched using the keywords "laparoscopic", "laparoscopically", "vaginal", "trasvaginal", "myomectomy", "randomized", "randomised" and "randomly" to identify randomized controlled trails which compared vaginal myomectomy and LM. Studies are also searched by hand. No language restrictions were made.

Results: Four trials were studied and the analysis was performed using Review Manager Version 5 and R software Version 2.11.1. The results had shown that vaginal myomectomy was associated with less operation time significantly, but reduced blood loss, hospital stay and gas recovery and more minor complications without significant difference.

Conclusions: This meta-analysis was not powerful to form an accurate conclusion because of less number, low quality of included studies and no data on major complications and long-term outcomes such as recurrence and pregnancy. Hence, more studies and data should be awaited and involved for further evaluation.