The combination of endoluminal radiofrequency ablation and metal stent implantation for the treatment of malignant biliary stenosis – Randomized study

Comparison of Intraductal RFA Plus Stent versus Stent-Only Treatment for Unresectable Perihilar Cholangiocarcinoma—A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…In the meta-analysis, a total of 511 patients were included across nine studies [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Of these patients, 217 received RFA + stent placement and 294 underwent stent placement without RFA.…”

“…Six studies included all four Bismuth-Corlette types of pCCA [24,26,27,[29][30][31], as specified in Table 1. Five studies were performed in Asia [24,[27][28][29]31], two in the USA [26,30] and two in Europe [23,25].…”

“…Five studies used an endoscopic approach [25,26,28,30,31], three used a percutaneous approach only [23,27,29] and one did not specify the method [24]. The type of stents placed were plastic and SEMSs in three studies [25,30,31], SEMSs only in three studies [23,27,29], plastic stents only in two studies [24,28] and one study did not report the type of stent placed [26]. Four studies specified chemo(radio)therapy as additional treatment [23,25,29,30].…”

“…The type of stents placed were plastic and SEMSs in three studies [25,30,31], SEMSs only in three studies [23,27,29], plastic stents only in two studies [24,28] and one study did not report the type of stent placed [26]. Four studies specified chemo(radio)therapy as additional treatment [23,25,29,30]. The characteristics of the studies included in the meta-analysis are further described in Table 1.…”

“…Details regarding quality assessment of the studies included in the meta-analysis are provided in Tables S2 and S3. We found that eight were of good quality [23,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31] and one of fair quality [24]. For three studies, only an abstract was published [24,26,30].…”