A Systematic Review Protocol for Assessing Efficacy and Safety of Ayurveda Medicine in Treatment of Allergic Rhinitis

Introduction: A systematic review is planned to investigate the safety and efficacy of Ayurveda interventions for allergic rhinitis (AR) through analyzing published and unpublished clinical research. Materials and methods: A systematic review of published clinical work or Ayurveda interventions for AR will be conducted. PubMed, AYUSH Research Portal, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), hand searches, snowballing of studies will also be performed to fetch complete available literature. Manual search includes Ayurveda postgraduate (PG) and doctor of philosophy (PhD) dissertations on the management of AR. The selection of the studies, data extraction, and synthesis will be performed independently by researchers, and a third reviewer will seek disagreements. Established guidelines for study selection, quality assessment, and narrative synthesis will be followed. Risk of bias assessment will be performed with the help of Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomized trials (RoB2) tool for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and risk of bias tool to assess nonrandomized studies of interventions (ROBINS-I) tool for non-RCTs (NRCTs). Results of the study will be narratively synthesized and presented in count, percentage, and frequency. As this will be the first systematic review 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 received from the Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC). Dissemination: The review is ongoing, and after completion, it will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. The study will be updated to inform and guide healthcare practice and policy. Trial registration number: PROSPERO 2018 CRD42018107035.