The risk of post-polypectomy bleeding in patients undergoing colonoscopy on uninterrupted aspirin therapy has been a matter of debate for many years. A systematic literature search was performed in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and Chinese Biomedical Literature Database updated on October 2016 for all qualified publications. The search included keywords for aspirin, endoscopic procedure, bleeding, and clinical trials. The selection was not confined regarding types of design or year of publication. Duplicate articles were removed. For each study, the odds ratio and its 95% confidence interval were calculated to assess the association strength between bleeding after colonoscopic polypectomy and uninterrupted use of aspirin. A total of 5 eligible studies were eventually included. Among these 5 case-control studies, only 1 was prospective, and the other 4 were retrospective. Finally, the analysis shows that uninterrupted using of aspirin increased the risk of post-polypectomy bleeding (OR=1.44, 95% CI=1.06–1.96, P=0.02). Our meta-analysis shows that uninterrupted aspirin therapy probably increases the risk of bleeding after colonoscopic polypectomy.

Keywords: Aspirin, Colonoscopy, Meta-Analysis as Topic, Postoperative Hemorrhage