Clinical effect of drug-eluting beads and conventional transcatheter arterial chemoembolization in treatment of unresectable liver cancer: A meta-analysis / 临床肝胆病杂志

ObjectiveTo systematically review the clinical effect of transcatheter arterial chemoembolization with drug-eluting beads (DEB-TACE) versus conventional transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (cTACE) in the treatment of unresectable liver cancer. MethodsPubMed, Embase, Cochrane, and CNKI were searched for articles on clinical control trials of DEB-TACE versus cTACE in the treatment of unresectable liver cancer. The articles were screened according to inclusion and exclusion criteria, and after valid data were extracted, Revman 5.3 software was used for meta-analysis. The two groups were compared in terms of the number of patients with complete remission (CR), partial remission (PR), or stable disease (SD) and 6- and 12-month survival rates. ResultsA total of 12 articles were included, with 1177 patients in total, among whom 519 patients underwent DEB-TACE and 658 underwent cTACE. Compared with the cTACE group, the DEB-TACE group had a significantly higher number of patients with CR (risk ratio ［RR］=1.42, 95% confidence interval ［CI］: 1.18-1.72, P=0.0002), and had a significantly higher 12-month survival rate (RR=1.09, 95% CI: 1.01-1.17, P=0.03). There were no significant differences between the two groups in the number of patients with PR (RR=1.13, 95% CI: 0.97-130, P=0.12), the number of patients with SD (RR=0.82, 95% CI: 0.64-1.05, P=0.12), 6-month survival rate (RR=1.05, 95% CI: 1.00-1.10, P=0.07). ConclusionDEB-TACE has a better therapeutic effect than cTACE with iodinated oil.