Objective To assess the effectiveness of dust mite sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) for treating allergic rhinitis. Methods The randomized controlled trials (RCTs) about SLIT treating allergic rhinitis were collected in MEDLINE, EMbase, The Cochrane library (Issue 10, 2012), CNKI, VIP, WanFang Data and CBM from inception to October, 2012. Two reviewers independently screened the literature according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, extracted the data, and assessed the quality, and then the meta-analysis was performed by using RevMan 5.1 software. Results A total of 8 RCTs involving 788 patients were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that, compared with the control group, SLIT showed no obvious difference in the total effective rate (RR=1.15, 95%CI 0.88 to 1.50, P=0.29), but it was superior in decreasing the scores of both nasal symptom (SMD= ?1.13, 95%CI ?2.07 to ?0.20, P=0.02) and drug intake (SMD= ?0.60, 95%CI ?1.06 to ?0.15, P=0.009). Conclusion SLIT can improve the symptoms of patients with allergic rhinitis, and it can also decrease the using frequency of antihistamine, beta-blocker and nasal spray steroids.
