Efficacy of TTFields in high-grade gliomas: a protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

INTRODUCTION: Despite their recent FDA(Food and Drug Administration) approval, tumour treatment fields (TTFields) have not seen acceptance as part of standard of care (SOC) for the treatment of high-grade gliomas (HGGs). Few studies have reported the clinical effect of simultaneous or sequential use of TTFields with the current SOC. However, whether TTFields are beneficial over the standard treatment remains to be established with a meta-analysis. Therefore, we here performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to understand the benefit of TTFields for patients with HGGs. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We registered this systematic review with the PROSPERO network (registration number: CRD42023398972) and aimed to follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines in the study. All articles related to TTFields in glioma will be systematically searched for in the following databases since their inception until November 2023: the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Embase, Cochrane Library, Wanfang Database, China Science Journal Database, China Biomedical Documentation Database, VIP database, Web of Science and PubMed. Article screening and data extraction will be done independently by the authors and cross-checked by two of the authors on completion. The Cochrane risk of bias assessment tool will be used for quality assessment of the included studies. Review Manager V.5.3 (Cochrane Collaboration) will be used to perform the meta-analysis. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethical approval is not required because the data used will be obtained from published studies, and there will be no concerns about privacy. The results of this study will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42023398972.