Chinese patent medicines for the treatment of the common cold: a systematic review of randomized clinical trials

BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Research Article

Wei Chen¹  Jun Ren¹  Jian-ping Liu¹  Li-qiong Wang¹  Bo Liu² 

[1] Centre For Evidence-Based Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China;Medical Care Center, Beijing Friendship Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China;

关键词: Common cold;    Traditional Chinese medicine;    Chinese patent medicine;    Randomized controlled trial;    Systematic review;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6882-14-273

 received in 2013-10-31, accepted in 2014-07-18,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundMany Chinese patent medicines (CPMs) have been authorized by the Chinese State of Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of the common cold. A number of clinical trials have been conducted and published. However, there is no systematic review or meta-analysis on their efficacy and safety for the common cold to justify their clinical use.MethodsWe searched CENTRAL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, SinoMed, CNKI, VIP, China Important Conference Papers Database, China Dissertation Database, and online clinical trial registry websites for published and unpublished randomized clinical trials (RCTs) of CPMs for the common cold till 31 March 2013. Revman 5.2 software was used for data analysis with effect estimate presented as relative risk (RR) and mean difference (MD) with a 95% confidence interval (CI).ResultsA total of five RCTs were identified. All of the RCTs were of high risk of bias with flawed study design and poor methodological quality. All RCTs included children aged between 6 months to 14 years. Results of individual trials showed that Shuanghuanglian oral liquid (RR 4.00; 95% CI: 2.26 to 7.08), and Xiaoer Resuqing oral liquid (RR 1.43; 95% CI: 1.15 to 1.77) had higher cure rates compared with antivirus drugs. Most of the trials did not report adverse events, and the safety of CPMs was still uncertain.ConclusionsSome CPMs showed a potential positive effect for the common cold on cure rate. However, due to the poor methodology quality and the defects in the clinical design of the included RCTs, such as the lack of placebo controlled trials, the inappropriate comparison intervention and outcome measurement, the confirmative conclusions on the beneficial effect of CPMs for the common cold could not be drawn.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Chen et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.