Chinese herbal medicine for psoriasis: Protocol for an overview of systematic reviews

Psoriasis is a chronic recurrent dermatological disease that patents always suffer from different comorbidities. Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) has been commonly used in the treatment of psoriasis for a long history. Previous systematic reviews (SRs)/meta-analyses (MAs) have shown that CHM may benefit patients with psoriasis. This overview aims to summarize the evidence from published SRs/MAs for clinical application and to provide several directions for future researches.

Nine electronic databases (Medline, Embase, Cochrane Library, AMED, CINAHL, CBM, CNKI, VIP Database, Wanfang Databases) will be searched from their inceptions to September 2020 without language restrictions. At least 2 reviewers will independently conduct the study selection, data extraction, and quality assessment. The methodological quality, risk of bias, reporting quality, and evidence quality will be respectively evaluated by the Assessing the Methodological Quality of Systematic Reviews 2 (AMSTAR 2), the Risk of Bias in Systematic Reviews, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), and the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) system.

The results of this overview will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publication.

We expect to compile current evidence from published SRs/MAs of CHM for patients with psoriasis in an accessible and useful document.

This study is a protocol for an overview of SRs/MAs that did not involve individual data. Thus, ethical approval is not required.

DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/VC654.