Efficacy and safety of acupuncture and moxibustion for herpes zoster: A protocol for systematic review and network meta analysis

In this study, a network meta-analysis (NMA) is used to rank various interventions of acupuncture. Methods and analysis: Electronic searches of abstracts and titles will be performed in MEDLINE, EMBASE, CENTRAL, CBM, CNKI, CQVIP, and Wanfang Data databases, from inception to December 31, 2019. Published and unpublished controlled trials with different acupuncture interventions will be selected, trials of antiviral drugs as the control group. All patients of HZ will be included, except for those diagnosed with PHN, immunocompromised patients, or those with complications. The effective therapy rate and the incidence of PHN are primary outcomes. The NMA will be analyzed with Stata 13.0 and GeMTC 0.14.3. Discussion: The NMA will be established to compare various interventions of acupuncture for the therapy of HZ, that could resolve the limitations of previous methodologies with this protocol. It will be possible to determine the best acupuncture intervention for more primary outcomes of therapy, including subgroup analysis of patients with aged ≥50 years and those of aged
Source: Medicine - Category: Internal Medicine Tags: Research Article: Study Protocol Systematic Review Source Type: research