Objective To evaluate the influences of myocardial injury markers on the short-term and long-term mortality after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), so as to provide valuable references for clinical prognosis assessment. Methods Literature was electronically searched in CBM, PubMed, OVID, EMbase and CNKI from the date of their establishment to August 2011, meanwhile the manual searches were also performed to systemize the papers. According to the Cochrane Handbook for systematic reviews, the studies were screened by two reviewers independently, the quality of the included studies was evaluated, the data were extracted, and meta-analysis was conducted using RevMan5.0 software. Results A total of 10 observational studies including creatine kinase-myocardial band (CK-MB) and cardiac troponin I (cTnI), and the patients involved were 10 793 totally. Results of meta-analysis showed that the increasing release of CK-MB was associated with an increasing short-term mortality risk of both on-pump (RR=2.88, 95%CI 1.94 to 4.28, Plt;0.000 01) and off-pump group (RR=3.64, 95%CI 1.07 to 12.42), P=0.04). Also the increasing release of CK-MB was associated with an increasing long-term mortality risk of both on-pump (RR=2.55, 95%CI 1.91 to 3.40, Plt;0.000 01) and off-pump group (RR=3.36, 95%CI1.46 to 7.72, P=0.004). The increasing release of cTnI was also associated with an increasing risk of both short-term mortality (RR=6.45, 95%CI 2.50 to 16.66, Plt;0.1) and long-term mortality (RR=4.18, 95%CI 2.78 to 6.28, Plt;0.1). Conclusion The evidence shows that the increasing release of both CK-MB and cTnI is associated with an increasing risk of the short-term and long-term mortality.