Surgical lymph node assessment in mucinous ovarian carcinoma staging : a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: The proportion of women with mucinous ovarian carcinoma in whom nodal metastases are identified during staging remains unclear. Objectives: To review the literature on surgical lymph node assessment during staging of women diagnosed with mucinous ovarian carcinoma. Search strategy: A systematic search using synonyms of ‘mucinous ovarian carcinoma’ and ‘lymph node assessment’ was conducted in PubMed, Scopus, Embase and the Cochrane Library. Selection criteria: When they covered ten or more mucinous ovarian carcinoma cases, staging surgery and minimally one of the following outcomes: prevalence of metastases, stage shift or survival data. Data collection and analysis: Studies were quality evaluated with the Cochrane risk-of-bias assessment tool for non-randomised studies of interventions. Outcomes were pooled using an inverse variance weighted random effects model. Main results: Sixteen studies were included. In 278 women with mucinous ovarian cancer suspected to be stage I–II, a pooled proportion of 0.8% (95% C