For the non-surgical conservative clinical management of rotator cuff injuries, corticosteroid injections in combination with hyaluronic acid injections are beneficial.

The efficacy of drug injections for management of rotator cuff injuries was examined in a network meta-analysis.

For relevant literature search on efficacy of steroid injections for rotator cuff injury, databases such as Wan-Fang Database, China Science and Technology Journal Database, Chinese BioMedical Literature on disc, Chinese national knowledge infrastructure, Embase, Cochrane Library, and PubMed were explored.

As per the inclusion and exclusion criteria, screening of literature was done. Data was extracted and quality of the life was concurrently assessed by 2 researchers. For comparing the variations in effectiveness of each therapy measure and rank the effectiveness utilizing 95% confidence interval (CI) and ratio as effect indicator, statistical analysis was carried out using Stata 16.0 software.

Overall, 4 treatment measures—prolotherapy therapy (PRO), hyaluronic acid injection therapy (HA), platelet-rich plasma injection therapy (PRP), and corticosteroid injection therapy (COR)—were used in a total of 10 RCTs including 861 patients with rotator cuff injuries. According to the findings of the meta-analysis, the four therapeutic approaches were ranked as follows: COR + HA > PRP + COR > COR > PRP > PRO > PRP + HA > HA.

COR + HA injection appears to be the best non-surgical therapeutic option for rotator cuff injuries.