Efficacy of topical retinoic acid compared with topical fluocinolone acetonide in the treatment of oral lichen planus

Medical Management of Oral Lichen Planus: A Systematic Review

“…Seven trials comparing two active interventions (excluding steroids and calcineurin inhibitors) did not show evidence that any of these interventions may be effective in reducing pain and clinical signs of OLP, except for two trials [6,12]. However, these two trials were at high and unclear risk of bias respectively.…”

“…[18] all the participants received a systemic steroid, and in another study [28] the experimental intervention was compared with intralesional steroid. Of the 29 trials using steroid as an active intervention, clobetasol was used in nine trials [4,7,10,11,19,22,23,27,35], triamcinolone in ten trials [4,5,[13][14][15][16]20,28,31,36], flucinolone in two trials [6,8], dexamethasone in two trials [29,34], prednisolone in one trial [18], fluticasone in one trial [9] & betamethasone in two trials [9,20]. Systemic prednisolone was used in one trial [18].…”

“…Other treatments included: aloe vera in three trials [21,30,31], hyaluronic acid [26], curcuminoids as adjunctive treatment to prednisone [18], Bacillus Calmette-Guerin polysaccharide nucleic acid [28], topical retinoic acid [6], topical thalidomide [29], lycopene [32], topical isotretinoin [12], ignatia [25] & MuGard [37].…”

“…Clinical response was measured by eleven trials [6][7][8][9][10][14][15][16]21,27,30,31] using the clinical grading by Thongprasom 1992 consisting of a six-point ordinal scale, four trials [17,19,22,24] used a different clinical grading scale with scores 1 to 4. Tel Aviv San Francisco scale was used in one trial [32].…”

“…One study compared topical flucinoloneacetonide (0.1%) in an oral base with topical retinoic acid (0.05%) in an oral base [6] and found that both the pain scores & the clinical scores of lesions showed improvement in the flucinoloneacetonide group. Different concentrations of topical isotretinoin were compared [12] and the higher concentrations of the intervention were found to be more effective in reducing the symptoms as well as in clearing the lesions.…”