ObjectiveTo systematically review the protection effect of epidural anesthesia combined with general anesthesia versus general anesthesia alone in patients underwent cardiac surgery, so as to provide evidence for reducing complications of cardiac surgery. MethodsDatabases including PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library (Issue 2, 2015), WanFang Data, CBM, and CNKI were searched to collect randomized controlled trials (RCTs) about epidural anesthesia combined with general anesthesia versus general anesthesia alone for patients underwent cardiac surgery from inception to February 2015. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies. Then, meta-analysis was performed by RevMan 5.3 software. ResultsA total of 35 RCTs involving 3 311 patients were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that, compared with the general anesthesia group, the combination anesthesia group had lower incidence of supraventricular tachycardias (RR=0.63, 95%CI 0.48 to 0.83, P=0.001) and shorter ICU stay time (SMD=-0.57, 95%CI -1.02 to-0.12, P=0.01), but there were no significant differences in the incidences of respiratory complications, myocardial infarction, stroke and mortality between the two groups (all P values >0.05). ConclusionCurrent evidence shows that the combination of epidural anesthesia and general anesthesia has better protection effect than general anesthesia alone in cardiac surgery, but the influence on long-term prognosis still needs to be assessed. Due to the limited quality of included studies, the above conclusion still needs to be verified by more high quality studies．