Contrasting the Efficacy and Adverse Effects of Glucocorticoids versus Oral Propranolol in the Infantile Hemangiomas: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Introduction- Infantile hemangiomas are frequently encountered vascular neoplasms of infancy. Among Caucasian infants, the incidence of infantile hemangiomas ranges from 1.0 to 2.6 percent. Corticosteroid therapy, including topical, intralesional, and oral formulations, is commonly used as the first-line treatment approach for managing infantile hemangiomas. Among these, prednisolone is widely utilized in clinical practice. Previous studies have presented their findings demonstrating the effectiveness of oral propranolol in the management of infantile hemangiomas. This study aims to carry out a systematic review on the existing published literature to compare the efficacy and adverse events of glucocorticoids versus oral propranolol in the management of infantile hemangiomas and to summarize and conduct a meta-analysis on the current existing published articles.Methods- A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to selected relevant articles.Results- A total of 10 studies were selected for systematic review and a total of 5 studies were selected for meta-analysis from a potential pool of 381 studies. There were 51 duplicates. A total of 29 relevant references were identified and subsequently reviewed based on their titles and abstracts to determine their eligibility for inclusion in the study.   After going through the full texts and articles 46 articles were excluded (9 were non-RCTs, 14 lacked the endpoint that was required, 5 letters, 6 single-arm study and 1 had duplicate content and 11 study designs were not eligible). The meta-analysis involved 1008 cases from the selected 5 studies. The systematic review involved 1 systematic review and meta-analysis, 1 retrospective review, 1 meta-analysis that included randomized controlled trials, 1 expert opinion, 1 literature review and 4 meta-analyses.