There is a lack of consensus regarding clinician- and patient-reported oral lichen planus (OLP) outcomes. The World Workshop on Oral Medicine Outcomes Initiative for the Direction of Research (WONDER) Project aims to develop a core outcome set (COS) for OLP, which would inform the design of clinical trials and, importantly, facilitate meta-analysis, leading to the establishment of more robust evidence for the management of this condition and hence improved patient care.
Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, CENTRAL, and Clinicaltrials.gov were searched for interventional studies (randomized controlled trials, controlled clinical trials, and case series including =5 participants) on OLP and oral lichenoid reactions published between January 2001 and March 2022 without language restriction. All reported primary and secondary outcomes were extracted.
The searches yielded 9,135 records, and 291 studies were included after applying the inclusion criteria. A total of 422 outcomes were identified. These were then grouped based on semantic similarity, condensing the list to 69 outcomes. The most frequently measured outcomes were pain (51.9%), clinical grading of the lesions (29.6%), lesion size/extension/area (27.5%), and adverse events (17.5%).
As a first step in developing a COS for OLP, we summarized the outcomes that have been used in interventional studies over the past 2 decades, which are numerous and heterogeneous.