Efficacy and safety of floating needle therapy in the treatment of knee osteoarthritis: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a common clinical degenerative disease of the joints, which is prone to occur in middle-aged and elderly people. Its early manifestations include knee redness, swelling, pain, effusion, sound, and so on. With the development of the disease, KOA will also lead to joint deformity and disability, which will seriously affect the living ability of patients. It not only brings physical pain and dysfunction to patients, but also leads to anxiety, helplessness, depression, and social disorder in social psychology, which seriously affects patients’ daily life, social function and life quality, and also brings huge economic burden and pressure to family and social medical treatment. Floating needle therapy has shown strong advantages in the treatment of KOA, and the curative effect is accurate. Therefore, this paper will carry out a systematic evaluation and meta analysis of the efficacy and safety of floating needle therapy in the treatment of KOA. METHODS: We will search 8 electronic databases, including PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Chinese Science and Technology Periodical Database, Wanfang Database, and Chinese Biomedical Literature Database. We will search above electronic databases from the beginning to January 2021, without any language restriction. Clinical efficacy, including total effective rate or cure rate, visual analogue scale pain score, and recurrence rate will be accepted as the primary outcomes. The changes of traditional Chinese medicine symptom score, inflammatory factor level change, knee function score will be used as secondary outcomes. RevMan 5.3 software will be used for statistical analysis. The result about the curative effect and safety of floating needle therapy for knee osteoarthritis will be presented as risk ratio for dichotomous data and mean differences with a 95% confidence interval for continuous data. RESULTS: Only when we finish this meta analysis can we get the result, no results are available at this timed. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study will provide reliable evidence for the efficacy and safety of floating needle therapy in the treatment of knee osteoarthritis. INPLASY REGISTRATION NUMBER: INPLASY2020120145.