Background: Intraoperative blood salvage as a blood-saving strategy has been widely used in surgery. Considering its theoretic risk of malignant tumor cells being reinfused and the corresponding blood metastases, the safety of intraoperative blood salvage in cancer surgery remains controversial.
Methods: Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systemic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA), we searched the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE and EMBASE to November 2017. We included only studies comparing intraoperative blood salvage with allogeneic blood transfusion.
Results: This meta-analysis included 9 studies with 4354 patients with 1346 patients in the intraoperative blood salvage group and 3008 patients in the allogeneic blood transfusion group. There were no significant differences in the 5-year overall survival outcome (odds ratio [OR] 1.12; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.80-1.58), 5-year disease-free survival outcome (OR 1.08; 95% CI 0.86-1.35), or 5-year recurrence rate (OR 0.86; 95% CI 0.71-1.05) between the 2 study groups. Subgroup analysis also showed no significant differences in the 5-year overall survival outcome (OR 0.97; 95% CI 0.57-1.67) of hepatocellular carcinoma patients in liver transplantation.
Conclusions: For patients with malignant disease, intraoperative blood salvage did not increase the tumor recurrence rate and had comparable survival outcomes with allogeneic blood transfusion.