Balloon-mounting stent for intracranial arterial stenosis: A comprehensive and comparative systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction As one of the major causes of acute ischemic stroke, intracranial arterial stenosis necessitates an intervention that ranges from medical treatment to balloon angioplasty and stenting. Self-expandable stents (SES) and balloon-mounted stents (BMS) are two types of stents and their comparative efficacy and safety for intracranial stenosis are not well established. Methods Studies that investigate balloon-mounted stenting for intracranial stenosis were extracted from PubMed, Scopus, and Cochrane library. We sought to gather data on the success rate, change in mean arterial stenosis, and complications such as minor and major stroke and death (MMD), symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage, myocardial infarction, all-cause mortality, and in-stent re-stenosis. Results 3049 patients from 35 studies were included in this study. 20 studies investigated BMS alone and others compared BMS with SES. BMS was significantly more effective in reducing the degree of stenosis compared to SES (Difference in mean −5.953, CI 95% −7.727 to −4.179), had less complications compared to SES such as MMD (8.5% vs. 11.2%) and less in-stent re-stenosis (18.6% vs. 19.6%), but patients with SES experienced a lower rate of all-cause mortality(1.7% vs. 4.1%). Conclusion Intracranial stenting with BMS is more effective in reducing the degree of stenosis and has lower rates of complications when compared to SES.