RESULTS
The databases yielded 6,417 studies (3,213 in PubMed, 507 in CAB direct,
and 2,697 in Web of Science), and one study was included from other
sources. After removing duplicates through a reference manager software
(Zotero®), the abstracts of 4,524 titles were screened independently by
two authors. Disagreements were among all authors until resolution. We
excluded 4,365 articles because they did not investigate corticosteroids
applied through the IA route, or not alone, or investigated diseases
other than OA, or were not published in English. We subjected 159
articles to full-text analysis. After applying the general inclusion
criteria, 95 articles were selected for screening according to the
criteria of each study question.
Twenty-three articles fit all inclusion criteria for question 1, and 21
were included for question 2 (Figure 1). Summaries of included studies
for each question are available in supplementary material 1 and 2. Okike
et al. (2021) included two investigations; however, only the
case-control study was included in the results, as the retrospective
cohort investigated the effects of corticosteroids plus local
anesthetics. Some of the papers also investigated other therapies (e.g.,
hyaluronic acid [HA] or platelet-rich plasma [PRP]); however,
comparison of these to corticosteroids is beyond the scope of this
review, so only the corticosteroid and negative control groups of these
studies were considered.