RESEARCH STUDY

Salicylic acid and cryotherapy for skin warts (Cochrane, 2012)

2012
Meta-analysis
8815
High

One-line finding

Salicylic acid modestly improves wart clearance, and cryotherapy was not clearly better than salicylic acid.

Plain-language summary

Researchers combined 85 randomized trials with 8,815 people to see which wart treatments work. Salicylic acid painted on the skin had a clear but modest benefit over a dummy treatment, with few side effects. Freezing (cryotherapy) was not clearly better than salicylic acid, and using the two together seemed to help more than salicylic acid alone. Many of the included studies were small or lower quality.

Citation

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