Critical Appraisal of the Published Clinical Trials on "The Effect of Herbal Medicine on Striae Gravidarum"

Combining research results with clinical practice has become a challenge. The critical appraisal helps make decisions. For this purpose, this study was performed aimed to critical evaluate the published clinical trials on "the effect of herbal medicine on striae gravidarum".

  In this critical review, the clinical trials articles published between 1972 and 2017 about the effect of herbal medicine on striae gravidarum were searched in the electronic scientific databases including Web of Science, PubMed, Embase, Scopus, Google Scholar and Persian articles in SID, Magiran, Goggle Scholar, using the keywords (Striae gravidarum OR Striae OR Stretch Marks) AND (Prevention OR Treatment OR Control) AND (Cream OR Gel OR Oil) and (Striae or pregnancy striae or pregnancy lines) and (prevention or treatment or control) and (Cream or gel or oil). The lasted edition of the CONSORT checklist (2018) was used. The scoring range was 0-45. The articles based on the scores were classified into three categories: poor, moderate and good. Data were analyzed by SPSS software (version 22) and descriptive statistics.

Out of the 14 articles reviewed, the overall compliance of the quality of the reviewed articles was estimated 46% with the Consort 2018 criteria. In general, the biggest shortcoming was in the participation of stakeholders and then the method of work. The overall mean score of the articles was 20.86±7.18 from a minimum and a maximum of 9-33.

The quality of the clinical trial reports on the effect of using herbal products on reducing pregnancy striae is not appropriate and desirable. Since the biggest shortcoming was in the method, it is recommended to solve these problems by using statistics and methodology experts and standard tools such as consort for self-evaluation of articles.