Abstract 16747: Surgical Atrial Fibrillation Ablation: a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Background: Surgical ablation for atrial fibrillation (AF) significantly improves maintenance of sinus rhythm and is recommended as a concomitant procedure in patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Current trials lack power to assess for patient-important outcomes such as mortality, stroke and pacemaker requirement. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy and safety of surgical AF ablation. Methods: We searched Cochrane CENTRAL, MEDLINE and EMBASE from inception to May 2016 for RCTs evaluating surgical AF ablation using any lesion set versus no surgical AF ablation in adults with AF undergoing cardiac surgery. We performed screening, full-text eligibility assessment, risk of bias evaluation and data collection independently and in duplicate. We evaluated the risk of bias for individual studies with the modified Cochrane tool, overall quality of evidence with the GRADE framework and pooled data using a random effects model in Revman 5.3. Results: We identified 22 studies (...