Manipulation for treatment of degenerative lumbar spondylolisthesis: A protocol of systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Degenerative lumbar spondylolisthesis (DLS) is one of the common orthopedic diseases which causes low back pain in patients, which seriously affects people's daily life and work. As a method of conservative treatment of this disease, manipulation is widely used in clinical practice. We will summarize the current published evidence of manipulation in the treatment of DLS, and evaluate the effectiveness and safety of manipulation through systematic review and meta-analysis, so as to provide more reliable evidence for future clinical practice. METHODS: We will conduct a comprehensive search of the following 9 databases until January 2019: PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, ClinicalTrials.gov, Web of Science, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, Chinese Science and Technique Journals Database, Wan Fang Database, and Chinese Biomedical Database. The 2 researchers will independently search, screen, extract data, and evaluate the quality of the literatures. The primary outcomes include clinical effectiveness, Japanese Orthopaedic Association scores, and the secondary outcomes include visual analog scale scores, symptom scores, and adverse events. Bias risk tools provided by Cochrane Collaboration will be used for literature quality assessment, and RevMan 5.3 software will be used for meta-analysis. RESULTS: The results of this study will systematically evaluate the effectiveness and safety of manipulation intervention for people with DLS, especially in improving lumbar function scores and pain scores. CONCLUSION: The systematic review of this study will summarize the current published evidence of manipulation for the treatment of DLS, which can further guide the promotion and application of it. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This study does not require ethical approval and the results will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42019139933.