Acupuncture for pain caused by prostate cancer: Protocol for a systematic review

BACKGROUND: Prostate cancer is a male malignant tumor disease with high prevalence in recent years. Patients with advanced prostate cancer are more likely to have bone metastasis and strong bone pain, and even lead to pathological fracture, which has a serious impact on the quality of life of patients. Acupuncture has good clinical efficacy in treating pain caused by prostate cancer. This review hopes to adopt meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy and safety of acupuncture in the treatment of pain caused by prostate cancer and provides evidence for its application in clinical practice. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will search for PubMed, Cochrane Library, AMED, EMbase, WorldSciNet, Nature, Science online and China Journal Full-text Database (CNKI), China Biomedical Literature CD-ROM Database (CBM), and related randomized controlled trials included in the China Resources Database. The time is limited from the construction of the library to November 2018. We will use the criteria provided by Cochrane 5.1.0 for quality assessment and risk assessment of the included studies, and use the Revman 5.3 and Stata 13.0 software for meta-analysis of the effectiveness, recurrence rate, and symptom scores of epididymitis. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This systematic review will evaluate the efficacy and safety of acupuncture for pain caused by prostate cancer. Owing to the fact that all of the data used in this systematic review and meta-analysis have been published, this review does not require ethical approval. Furthermore, all data will be anonymously analyzed during the review process trial. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: PROSPERO CRD42018111550