Objective To compare the efficacy and prognosis between surgical treatment and non-operative treatment for traumatic subdural effusion (TSE) adult in adults.Methods Wanfang data,VIP database,CNKI,PubMed,EMBase,Cochrane were searched for the relevant papers published between 1985 and 2015.According to the inclusion and exclusion criteria,quality of the papers enrolled was evaluated using the Jadad scale and Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS).RevMan 5.2 software was used to have a meta-analysis on the extracted data between operation group and non-operation group in recent cure rate,short-term effective rate,recent inefficiency,recent chronic subdural hematoma (CSDH)incidence,early mortality,long-term cure rate and long-term CSDH incidence,and bias analysis of the results was conducted.Results Nine papers with a total of 824 patients were enrolled in this metaanalysis.There were no significant differences between the two groups with respect to recent cure rate (OR =2.39,95％ CI 0.72 ～ 7.88,P ＞ 0.05),recent inefficiency (OR =0.85,95％ CI 0.12-6.01,P＞0.05),recent CSDH incidence (OR =0.79,95％ CI 0.35-1.76,P ＞0.05) and early mortality (OR =2.88,95％ CI 0.13-61.55,P ＞ 0.05).Between-group differences were significant in short-term effective rate (OR =0.20,95％ CI 0.06-0.64,P ＜ 0.01),long-term cure rate (OR =0.32,95％ CI 0.14-0.71,P ＜ 0.01),long-term CSDH incidence(OR =3.14,95％ CI 1.42-6.97,P ＜ 0.01).Bias analysis showed no publication bias in the long-term outcome of the enrolled papers.Conclusion For TSE patients,surgical treatment exhibits significantly better results in recent effective rate,long-term cure rate and long-term CSDH incidence than non-operative treatment.