ObjectiveTo systematically evaluate the analgesic efficacy of local infiltration analgesia versus femoral nerve block for total knee arthroplasty. MethodsDatabases including PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library (Issue 4, 2016), WanFang Data, CBM, and CNKI were searched to collect randomized controlled trials (RCTs) about the analgesic efficacy of local infiltration analgesia versus femoral nerve block for total knee arthroplasty from inception to April 2016. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies. The meta-analysis was conducted using RevMan 5.3 software. ResultsA total of 13 RCTs involving 1 001 patients were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that: There were no significant differences in pain scores at rest (SMD=0.02, 95%CI -0.23 to 0.27, P=0.86), morphine consumption on movement (MD=-1.85, 95%CI -4.67 to 0.97, P=0.20), incidence of post-operative nausea and vomiting (RD=0.02, 95%CI -0.03 to 0.08, P=0.41) and incidence of post-operative knee infection (RD=0.01, 95%CI -0.02 to 0.03, P=0.60) between the two groups, but he local infiltration analgesia group had lower length of stay than the femoral nerve block group with statistical difference (SMD=-0.24, 95%CI -0.41 to -0.07, P=0.005). ConclusionLocal infiltration analgesia provides similar postoperative analgesia after total knee arthroplasty to femoral nerve block. However, due to the limited quantity of the included studies, the above conclusion still need to be verified by more high quality studies.