A comparison of the efficacy and safety of traditional Chinese medicine external treatment for the knee osteoarthritis A protocol for systematic review and network meta-analysis

Background: Knee osteoarthritis (KOA), also known as degenerative osteoarthritis, is a common and frequently occurring disease in orthopedics with cartilage degeneration as the pathogenic cause and articular bone hyperplasia as the sign. Many studies have confirmed that KOA can be effectively treated by traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) external treatment. So we take advantage of the method of network meta-analysis to systematically compare the efficacy and safety of different types of TCM external treatment for the KOA. Methods: We will research on external treatment of KOA by traditional Chinese medicine using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in search database (EMBASE, PubMed, Web of Science, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure [CNKI], Weipu database [VIP], Wanfang, and China BioMedical Literature [CBM]). The data and evidence obtained will be processed using Stata 15.0 and WinBUGS 1.4.3. Results: We will evaluate the efficacy and safety of traditional Chinese medicine external treatment for the knee osteoarthritis in this study. Conclusion: This study will provide a new regimen for KOA treatment. It has extremely high reference value. INPLASY registration number: INPLASY2020120001. DOI number : 10.37766/inplasy2020.12.0001.