Diagnosis and treatment for hyperuricaemia and gout: a protocol for a systematic review of clinical practice guidelines and consensus statements.

INTRODUCTION: Gout and hyperuricaemia are major health issues and relevant guidance documents have been released by a variety of national and international organisations. However, these documents contain inconsistent recommendations with unclear quality profiles. We aim to conduct a systematic appraisal of the clinical practice guidelines and consensus statements pertaining to the diagnosis and treatment for hyperuricaemia and gout, and to summarise recommendations.

METHODS: We will search PubMed, EMBASE and guideline databases to identify published clinical practice guidelines and consensus statements. We will search Google and Google Scholar for additional potentially eligible documents. The quality of included guidelines and consensus statements will be assessed using the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (AGREE) II instrument and be presented as scores. We will also manually extract recommendations for clinical practice from all included documents.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The results of this systematic review will be disseminated through relevant conferences and peer-reviewed journals.

PROTOCOL REGISTRATION NUMBER: PROSPERO CRD42016046104.