Introduction: Chronic pain is one of the major health problems worldwide in recent years, and acupuncture-related therapies have been reported to have definite analgesic effects. However, it is still unclear which treatment is the most effective. Our systematic review and network meta-analysis protocol aims to summarize the evidence and determine the most effective method to treat the chronic musculoskeletal pain.
Methods and Analysis: Our literature search will be performed in five electronic databases—the Cochrane Library, EMBASE, and PubMed, AMED, CINAHL, until May 20, 2022. All randomized controlled trials of acupuncture-related therapies for chronic musculoskeletal pain will be included. The primary outcomes will be common pain-related scales, and the secondary outcomes will include quality of life and incidence of adverse events. Excel 2019 will be used for data extraction, RoB2 will be used for bias risk assessment. R 3.6.2 and WinBUGS V.1.4.3 software will be used for network data synthesis and to produce related plots. During the study, literature selection, data extraction, quality assessment and bias risk assessment will be independently completed by two reviewers, and differences will be judged by the third reviewer. Finally, the risk of bias and sources of heterogeneity in the study will be analyzed and explained in order to obtain reliable results.
Results: Our study will evaluate the effectiveness and safety of acupuncture-related therapies for the treatment of chronic musculoskeletal pain, and we will rank all methods to recommend the best appropriate treatment option.
Conclusion: This study will provide a good foundation for complementary and alternative medicine to treat chronic musculoskeletal pain. It will be also helpful to promote the clinical practice by providing evidence-based medical evidence.
Keywords: systematic review, network meta-analysis, acupuncture-related therapies, chronic musculoskeletal pain