Interpretation and consideration of core outcome set in clinical intervention study of oral lichen planus

Abstract

Oral lichen planus (OLP), as a chronic inflammatory disease of oral mucosa, cannot be completely cured at present. OLP can develop into oral squamous cell carcinoma and reduce the life quality of patients. The development of high-quality evidence-based strategies for OLP clinical management can effectively alleviate the clinical symptoms and reduce the risk of cancerization, thus to improve the life quality of patients. However, there is a wide variety of outcomes and a lack of uniform standards in previous OLP clinical intervention studies. Therefore, evidence-based analysis of relevant studies cannot be conducted to provide more convincing guidance for clinical diagnosis and treatment. To reduce the heterogeneity of clinical intervention studies, form a data pool for meta-analysis, and provide higher quality evidence-based OLP clinical management protocols, the World Workshop on Oral Medicine Ⅷ identified a core outcome set (COS) for OLP in three steps from March 2022 to January 2023. This article introduces the process of COS formulation, interprets OLP COS, and puts forward the advantages and drawback of OLP COS in this paper. We encourage researchers to use this COS in their future OLP clinical studies for improving the clinical significance and evidence-based value of studies.