Effects of epidural anesthesia on the prognosis of ovarian cancer-a systematic review and meta-analysis.

"Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participateNot applicable. Consent for publicationNot applicable. Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing interests. Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests."

"Funding We have no fundings to support this study."

"The study aims to compare the effect of epidural anesthesia with general anesthesia on survival time after cytoreductive surgery in patients with ovarian cancer. We conducted this study following the 2020 PRISMA guidelines (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis). The protocol of this systematic review and meta-analysis was registered in PROSPERO, and the registration number is CRD42021240831. Funnel plots are the most commonly used visualizations to demonstrate publication bias. We used the funnel plot of the Review Manager (RevMan) 5.2 to observe publication bias. Sensitivity analysis was performed by excluding 1 document in turn and merging the remaining documents (n-1 documents) for meta-analysis, and assessing whether the results of the original meta-analysis were significantly altered by the influence of certain studies by observing the changes in the merged results. We performed subgroup analyses of the results depending on whether the administration of epidural anesthesia was intraoperative (EIP) or postoperative (EP) to test the stability of the results."