Meta-analysis on the Effectiveness and Safety of Propolis Preparation in the Treatment of Aphthous Ulcers

Objective: To systematically evaluate the effectiveness and safety of propolis preparation in the treatment of aphthous ulcers in order to provide evidence-based references for its clinical treatment.

Methods: Databases, such as CNKI, VIP, Wanfang, CBM, PubMed, EMbase, Cochrane Library, and so on, were searched to collect the randomized controlled trials (RCT) on the propolis preparation (the treatment group) with the conventional treatments (the control group) in the treatment of aphthous ulcers. After the data of clinical studies that met the inclusion criteria were extracted by two researchers, the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool was used to evaluate the methodology quality, and RevMan 5.4 was used for Meta-analysis.

Results: A total of 23 studies were included, involving 2467 participants with 1356 in the treatment group and 1111 in the control group. The overall quality of the RCTs was relatively low. Meta-analysis showed that propolis preparation for aphthous ulcers, compared with conventional Western medicines could improve the total efficacy rate (RR= 1.40, 95%CI[1.33, 1.46], P<0.00001), no incidence of adverse reactions .

Conclusion: Propolis preparation has demonstrated promising therapeutic efficiency and safety in treatment of aphthous ulcers. However, this study has certain limitations since the overall quality of included RCTs is relatively low, affecting the reliability of the results, and further high-quality studies are required for verification.