The efficacy and safety of fire needle therapy for COVID-19: Protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a new type of coronavirus, first reported in Wuhan, China at the end of December 2019. As a result of the worldwide outbreak, the number of patients continues to increase. With multiple therapeutic interventions, more and more patients are recovering. Fire needle is used as an alternative therapy. At present, there are no relevant articles for systematic review and meta-analysis, so this study will evaluate the efficacy and safety of fire needle in the treatment of COVID-19 pneumonia. METHODS: The following electronic bibliographic databases will be searched to identify relevant studies from December 2019 to December 2020: MEDLINE, PubMed, Embase, Cochrane library, Web of Science, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Technical Periodicals (VIP), Wan-fang data, Chinese Biological Medicine Database (CBM), and other databases. All included articles were randomized controlled trial without any language restrictions. Two reviewers will independently conduct cations retrieval, de-duplication, filtering, quality assessment, and data analysis by the Review Manager (V.5.3). Meta-analysis, subgroup analysis and/or descriptive analysis were performed on the included data. DISCUSSION: This study will investigate the application of fire needle in the treatment or prevention of COVID-19, and provide a high-quality synthesis to evaluate whether fire needle is an effective and safe intervention for COVID-19. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO registration number: CRD 42020193703.