Meta-Analysis of Ureteral Stent Removal Methods from 5 Randomized Controlled Trials

Five randomized controlled trials involving 598 patients were included in this systematic review and meta-analysis. The study, authored by Ce Dong and uploaded to figshare in March 2026, compares pain and complication outcomes for string-based versus cystoscopic ureteral stent removal following lithotripsy. It synthesizes data from PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and Scopus up to September 2025.

Use Cases

• Assessing the efficacy of string-based stent removal for reducing patient pain based on Visual Analog Scale (VAS) scores.
• Comparing complication rates, such as urinary tract infection (UTI), between two stent removal methods.
• Investigating sex-based differences in pain outcomes from the described subgroup analyses.
• Evaluating the certainty of evidence in a clinical domain using the described GRADE approach and risk of bias assessment.

Strengths

• Focuses on a specific clinical question with data from 5 randomized controlled trials.
• Includes quantitative results such as mean differences and confidence intervals for pain outcomes.
• Registered with PROSPERO (CRD420251069187), indicating a structured review protocol.
• Released under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license for reuse.

Limitations

• The dataset is a 12.1 KB DOCX file, suggesting it contains the review manuscript rather than the underlying raw trial data.
• Row count and column-level documentation for any underlying data are unknown.
• The authors note a limited number of studies, substantial heterogeneity, and low certainty of evidence in their conclusion.

Provenance

Source

figshare, authored by Ce Dong.

Collection Method

Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials from multiple medical databases.

Time Range

Literature search conducted up to September 2025.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-17 13:05:50.

Geography

null