Natural Treatment of Oral Aphthous Ulcers: A Systematic Review

Background and purpose: Due to the large number of studies on traditional and herbal treatments for oral aphthous and lack of comprehensive studies on these cases, the purpose of this research was to study and careful analysis of the effectiveness of herbal medicines used in the treatment of these lesions and reported the final outcome that one of the best study methods in these cases is a systematic review. Methods: Five electronic databases (PubMed, ISI web of science, Scopus, Cochrane and OVID) by keywords based on the PICO were searched to identify all the clinical trials with topical and systemic therapeutic interventions aimed at treating or preventing recurrence published in Persian or English that related to the effects of drugs of natural herbal origin for the treatment of recurrent aphthous stomatitis from 2010 to 2015. A structured and standardized form has been used to extract data. Title, journal, year of publication and the field of the first author and corresponding author were recorded. Standard tools of risk of bias used in the systematic review studies that has been developed by the Cochrane (Last update 2011) was applied to investigate bias in the studies. Results: In the current study a total of 33 trials were analyzed. These studies were assessed the effectiveness of 29 different herbal drugs for RAS treatment. Only five studies were assessed as being at medium risk of bias. No study had a low risk of bias. There were insufficient evidences to support or refute the use of these interventions. Conclusion: In summary, current data suggested that there was a beneficial effect in using topical treatments with plant origin for RAS and no study did not report any side effects. Though due to very weak report and disparate studies, acknowledging the fact that which herbal treatment was the best and most effective treatment was not possible.