Efficacy and safety of acupuncture for adenomyosis: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Adenomyosis (AM) is a disease in which the endometrium (including glands and stroma) invades the myometrium and grows. The main clinical symptoms include menorrhagia, dysmenorrhea, chronic pelvic pain, metrorrhagia, and dyspareunia, which will seriously affect the physical and mental health of patients, and most of which occur in women of childbearing age. Acupuncture, as a special external treatment of Traditional Chinese medicine, has shown good effects in the treatment of adenomyosis. At present, there is a lack of systematic review on acupuncture in the treatment of adenomyosis. We conduct this study to evaluate the efficacy and safety of acupuncture in the treatment of adenomyosis. METHODS: We will search Chinese and English databases: Medline, Pubmed, EMBASE, Cochrane library, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Scientific and Journal Database, Wan Fang database (Wanfang), Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM) to identify articles of randomized clinical trials of acupuncture for adenomyosis. All above electronic databases will be searched from inception to September 30, 2021. RevMan 5.3 software will be used to conduct this systematic review. No language and publication status restrictions will be applied. RESULTS: The study will prove the efficacy and safety of acupuncture for adenomyosis. CONCLUSION: We plan to submit this systematic review to a peer-reviewed journal. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42021277136.