Therapeutic effect analysis of preoperative biliary drainage for obstructive jaundice        CAO Feng, LI Fei. Department of General Surgery, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100053, China
Corresponding author : LI Fei，E-mail：xw_lifei@yahoo.com.cn
Abstract    Objective    To determine the benefits and harms of preoperative biliary drainage (PBD) for obstructive jaundice.  Methods    Cochrane systematic evaluation was used to search data between 1966 and 2010 through Cochrane libraries of clinical comparative trials, PubMed, Embase, Cancer Lit and the Chinese BioMedical Literature on disc. The quality of literatures was independently evaluated and cross-checked by two evaluators. The indicators for assessment included overall mortality, overall morbidity and postoperative morbidity. The results were analyzed with RevMan 4.2 software. Results    Eight articles were involved in the Meta analysis with total 728 patients. No statistical differences were found in the overall mortality（OR 1.08，95%CI 0.68-1.73, P=0.74）, overall morbidity（OR 1.72，95%CI 0.86-3.45, P=0.13） and postoperative morbidity（OR 0.6，95%CI 0.35-1.03, P=0.06） between the groups. Conclusion    The potential benefits of PBD in terms of postoperative rates of death and complications do not outweigh the disadvantage of the drainage procedure and should be performed cautiously now.