Effectiveness and safety of Tai Chi for chronic pain of knee osteoarthritis: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Chronic pain (CP) has been a major area of interest in the field of knee osteoarthritis (KOA), further aggravating the dysthymia, stiffness, and dysfunction of KOA patients. As an important part of complementary and alternative medicine, Tai Chi has a positive effect on KOA patients. The systematic review is to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Tai Chi for KOA patients with CP. METHODS: A systematic search will be performed in the following electronic databases for randomized controlled trials to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Tai Chi in treating chronic pain of knee osteoarthritis: the Cochrane Library, PubMed, EMBASE, OVID-MEDLINE, and four Chinese databases (Wan Fang, CNKI, CBMdisc and VIP). Each database will be searched from inception to Dec. 2021. The process will include study selection, data extraction, risk of bias assessment and meta-analysis. RESULTS: This proposed study will evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Tai Chi for KOA patients with CP. Improvement in pain and adverse effects of KOA will be included in our measure. CONCLUSIONS: This proposed systematic review and meta-analysis will evaluate the existing evidence on the effectiveness and safety of Tai Chi for KOA patients with CP. DISSEMINATION AND ETHICS: The results of this review will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publication. This review does not require ethical approval because all of the data used in this systematic review and meta-analysis have already been published. Furthermore, all of these data will be analyzed anonymously during the review process. INPLASY REGISTRATION NUMBER: INPLASY2021120020.