• Song Jin, Yi-Fan Li, Di Qin, Dan-Qing Luo, Hong Guo, Xiu-Hua Gao, Ling Yue, and Hui Zheng.
• Teaching Hospital/Clinical Medicine Department, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.
• BMJ Open. 2019 Mar 20; 9 (3): e027778.

IntroductionNon-pharmacological treatments are used in the management of irritable bowel syndrome, and their effectiveness has been evaluated in multiple meta-analyses. The robustness of the results in the meta-analyses was not evaluated. We aimed to assess whether there is evidence of diverse biases in the meta-analyses and to identify the treatments without evidence of risk of bias.Methods And AnalysisWe will search MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Web of Science and CINAHL Plus for meta-analyses that evaluate the effectiveness of non-pharmacological treatments. The time of publication will be limited from inception to December 2018. The credibility of the meta-analyses will be evaluated by assessing between-study heterogeneity, small-study effect and excess significance bias. The between-study heterogeneity will be assessed using the Cochrane's Q test, and the extent of the heterogeneity will be classified using the I2 statistics. The existence of a small-study effect in a meta-analysis will be evaluated using the funnel plot method and confirmed by Egger's test. Excess significance bias will be evaluated by comparing the expected number of clinical studies with positive findings with the observed number.Ethics And DisseminationNo formal ethical approval is required since we will use publicly available data. We will disseminate the findings of the umbrella review through publication in a peer-reviewed journal and conference presentations.Prospero Registration NumberCRD42018111516.© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2019. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.

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