A Protocol for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Ayurvedic Interventions for Essential Hypertension

Abstract

Introduction: A systematic review (SR) is planned to investigate the safety, efficacy, and effectiveness of Ayurvedic interventions in the management of essential hypertension through analyzing published and unpublished clinical research. Materials and methods: A systematic review of published and unpublished clinical researches on Ayurveda interventions in the management of essential hypertension will be conducted. Electronic search will be carried out in PubMed, AYUSH Research Portal, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), and hand search, snowballing of studies will also be performed to fetch complete available literature. Manual search will be carried out for Ayurveda Post Graduate (PG) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) dissertations on management of essential hypertension. The selection of the studies, data extraction, and synthesis will be performed independently by researchers, and disagreements will be sought by a third reviewer. Established guidelines for study selection, quality assessment and narrative synthesis will be followed. Risk of bias assessment will be performed with help of Cochrane RoB2 tool for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and ROBINS-I tool for non-RCTs (NRCTs). Results will be narratively synthesized and will present the same in count, percentage and frequency. As this will be the first SR on this topic, outlining the protocol ensures transparency for the completed review. Patients will not be involved in any phase of the study; however, ethical approval has been sought from the institutional ethics committee. Results: The review is ongoing and after completion, the review will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. The review will be updated to inform and guide healthcare practice and policy. Trial registration number: PROSPERO 2019 CRD42019123886.