Quality in aesthetic medicine and surgery: a systematic review of clinical practice guidelines

Guidelines in medicine are essential tools to provide quality and standardised medical care. We analysed the quality of aesthetic medicine guidelines.

A systematic review with a prospective registration protocol (https://osf.io/8pdyv) of databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Science, Scopus, CDSR), web pages of scientific societies and grey literature was done from inception to February 2023 and without language restrictions. Quality was evaluated using AGREE II (% of the maximum score), RIGHT (% of the total 35 items) and a shared decision making (SDM) quality assessment tool (31 items score) individually and in duplicate, respectively.

Six (86%) guidelines were classified as not recommended; one (14%) was recommended with modifications, and all were classified as poorly reported (7/7; 100%). The median overall quality was 27% (IQR: 26-43) and 26% (IQR 15-36) for AGREE II and RIGHT, respectively. No document used these tools for its development. SDM appeared superfluity in almost all of the guidelines explored.

Aesthetic medicine and surgical guidelines had low quality and must be improved. There is a wide range of improvement, especially in applicability, reporting of evidence, recommendations, conflict of interest, quality control and SDM. These guidelines require a rigorous methodology based on systematic reviews to ensure quality evidence-based recommendations.