Chuna manual therapy in patients with functional dyspepsia: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

Functional dyspepsia (FD) is a functional gastrointestinal disease that occurs without any explanatory organic disease, involving discomforts in upper abdomen such as bloating or pain after eating food. Although there is a standard treatment for FD, the disease often recurs or develops into a chronic condition, resulting in poor quality of life for the patients and high socioeconomic burden. Chuna therapy is a manual treatment commonly used in traditional Korean medicine (TKM) for musculoskeletal diseases such as intervertebral disc disorders and spinal stenosis. Recent studies have shown that Chuna therapy can be applied for the treatment of FD and is helpful in symptom improvement; however, high-quality evidence is still lacking. Therefore, this systematic review protocol intends to analyze the efficacy and safety of Chuna manual therapy for FD. METHODS: We will search 11 electronic databases, including the Embase and MEDLINE, from their inception to June 2022. Two reviewers will independently screen the relevant studies and determine their compatibility with the search eligibility of this review. The primary outcome is the total clinical effective rate, and other variables such as dyspepsia-related symptom score, quality of life score, and adverse events will be analyzed. We will evaluate the quality of the evidence and interpret the overall findings using the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomized trials and the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation tool. To reduce the heterogeneity of the included studies, subgroup analysis according to the subdivisions of FD will be conducted and operational methods of Chuna therapy will be recorded in detail. RESULTS: This protocol describes the systematic review to establish scientific evidence of Chuna manual therapy in FD patients. CONCLUSION: We will categorize various types of Chuna therapy for providing guidelines that can be applied reproducibly in clinical practice.