Purpose: To evaluate and compare the efficacy of seven conventional treatments and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) combined therapies for oral lichen planus.
Materials and Methods: This study employs PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and Cnki to collect studies. After evaluating the quality and bias risk, RevMan 5.4.1 and R Gemtc package was utilised with a visual analogue scale and side effects as outcomes, to compare the efficacy of the seven treatments.
Results: This study included 20 studies, with a sample size of 1669. Our results suggest that photodynamic therapy and TCM demonstrate the most significant decrease in visual analogue scale and the rank is as follows: photodynamic therapy > TCM > TCM combined with non-hormonal immunosuppressive drugs > TCM combined with glucocorticoids > chloroquine combined with glucocorticoids > non-hormonal immunosuppressive drugs > glucocorticoids. Among them, compared to glucocorticoids, photodynamic therapy (–1.55, 95% CI: (–3.09, –0.02)), TCM (–1.25, 95% CI: (–2.46, –0.06)) significantly outperform in statistics. Moreover, no side effects were reported by the photodynamic therapy treatment. In the comparison with non-hormonal immunosuppressive drugs, the result indicates TCM (–4.17, 95% CI (–8.24, –0.34)), glucocorticoids (–2.78, 95% CI (–5.69, –0.17)) and their combination (–2.83, 95% CI (–5.93, –0.05)) have a significantly lower probability of the appearance of side effects.
Conclusion: This study indicates that TCM, from the perspectives of efficacy and the likelihood of side effects, outperforms all other common therapies, besides photodynamic therapy, in treating oral lichen planus.