Medicinal plants and natural compounds in the treatment of experimental endometriosis: A systematic review protocol

Endometriosis is defined as the endometrial tissue growth (containing both glandular and stromal components) on the extra uterine places especially peritoneal and visceral surfaces of the pelvis. The current medical treatments are mainly based on inhibiting oestrogen or treating the symptoms rather than curing the disease. The recurrence rate is nearly high after both current medical and surgical treatments for endometriosis. In recent years, medicinal herbs and other botanical products have become popular for relieving the symptoms of several gynaecologic disorders such as endometriosis. The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to provide the pre-clinical researches on medicinal plants (Not Chinese combinations) and its compounds studied in the treatment of experimental endometriosis. It will also prepare the strengths and limitations of available studies and offer future perspectives in this field. The following electronic databases will be searched up to December 2015: Medline (PubMed platform), Scopus. The grey literatures, Google scholar, and the reference list of all known primary articles, and relevant conference proceedings will also be checked. Only non-Chinese language papers will be placed in our searches or study selection. For assessing the risk of bias of the included studies, we will use the SYstematic Review Centre for Laboratory animal Experimentation risk of bias tool for animal studies (SYRCLE’s RoB tool). If the studies are sufficiently comparable, outcome data will be pooled. For outcome measures where a meta-analysis is not possible a qualitative data synthesis of the results from individual studies will be performed.