A critical overview of systematic reviews and meta-analyses of intra-articular injection of platelet rich plasma versus hyaluronic acid for knee osteoarthritis

This study is to summarize and evaluate the available evidence for the efficacy of platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and hyaluronic acid (HA) for knee osteoarthritis (KOA). Eight databases were searched from inception to September 15, 2024. All systematic reviews (SRs)/meta-analyses (MAs) treated with PRP versus HA for KOA were collected. Literature screening and data extraction were independently performed by two reviewers. The methodological quality, reporting quality, risk of bias, evidence quality, and evidence overlap rate of the included studies were evaluated by using AMSTAR 2, PRISMA 2020, ROBIS, GRADE, and GROOVE systems. Seventeen SRs were included. The results showed that the effectiveness and safety of PRP in the treatment of KOA may be superior to HA. The methodological quality of all 17 documents was extremely low quality. Sixteen of them had poor reporting quality, and there were relatively serious information deficiencies. All SRs were determined to be at high risk. Among the 221 outcome indicators, there were two medium-quality evidences, 30 low-quality evidences, and 189 extremely low-quality evidences. It was found that there was a very high overlap among the included articles. Currently, the quality of SRs on the treatment of KOA with PRP versus HA is relatively low. Future authors of SRs should adhere to quality assessment tool criteria, expand sample sizes to reduce overlap, and evaluate the quality of evidence for merged study results, in order to provide more reliable and rigorous evidence-based support for clinical practice.