The therapeutic effect of systemic (oral) corticosteroids on the recurrent aphthous stomatitis: A systematic review

Recurrent aphthous stomatitis (RAS) is the most common chronic disease of the oral cavity with 5-25% morbidity. Etiopathogenesis is still unclear and there is no certain cure for the disease. This study was conducted systematically to access the therapeutic effects of systemic (oral) corticosteroids on oral aphthae.

This systematic review study was conducted according to the Cochrane’s recommended manual, and clinical trial studies that compared oral systemic corticosteroids with placebo or other drugs, were considered eligible to include. For this purpose, keywords were determined using Mesh system and were searched through the Boolean searching method using “and” and “or” in the PubMed, Cochrane Library, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases. In order to increase sensitivity, time and language limitations were not implemented. Afterwards, all of the searched studies were evaluated and the required information was obtained.

In this systematic review, only five clinical trials were involved. In all of the studies, prednisone or prednisolone (the active form of prednisone) was used as a systemic corticosteroid, rather than systemic drugs such as colchicine, sulodexide, montelukast, levamisole, and placebo. In general, this drug was effective in healing aphthous symptoms.

There were few clinical trials using systemic corticosteroids. The results of this study showed that low prednisolone dosage combined with levamisole was effective in curing aphthae with no serious side effects.