Chinese herbal medicine for the treatment of recurrent miscarriage: a systematic review of randomized clinical trials

BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Research Article

Guo-Yan Yang¹  Jian-Ping Liu¹  Hui Luo²  Xing Liao³ 

[1] Center for Evidence-based Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China;Center for Evidence-based Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China;Institute for Tibetan Medicine, China Tibetology Research Center, Beijing, China;Institute of Basic Research in Clinical Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, China;

关键词: Chinese herbal medicine;    Recurrent miscarriage;    Systematic review;    Randomized clinical trials;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6882-13-320

 received in 2013-02-03, accepted in 2013-11-13,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundTraditional Chinese medicine has been widely used for the treatment of recurrent miscarriage in China and other Asian countries for long time. We conducted this review to systematically summarize the evidences of Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) for the prevention and treatment of recurrent miscarriage in randomized trials, and evaluate the effectiveness and safety of CHM compared with placebo or conventional medicine.MethodsWe searched studies in PubMed, ClinicalTrials, the Cochrane Library, CNKI, SinoMed and VIP databases until December, 2012. Randomized trials on CHM alone or in combination with conventional medicine for recurrent miscarriage compared with placebo or conventional medicine were included. We evaluated the methodological quality of each included trials using the Cochrane risk of bias tool.ResultsA total of 41 RCTs (3660 participants) were included. The majority of trials had a high or unclear risk of bias. CHM used alone or plus progesterone-based treatment showed superior effect over progesterone-based treatment in improving live birth rate and embryonic developmental state (measured by B ultrasound). However, there is substantial heterogeneity within each subgroup analysis (I2 ranging from 35% to 71%). CHM plus progesterone and hCG-based treatment was superior to progesterone and hCG-based treatment in improving the embryonic developmental state, but not live birth rate. No severe adverse events were reported in relation to CHM.ConclusionsSome Chinese herbal medicines or in combination with progesterone-based treatment demonstrated potentially beneficial effect in improving live birth rate and embryonic developmental state for women with recurrent miscarriage. However, due to the substantial heterogeneity among the herbal interventions and limitations of methodological quality of the included trials, it is not possible to recommend any specific CHMs for recurrent miscarriage. Further rigorous clinical trials are warranted to evaluate the efficacy and safety of CHM.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Yang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. 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 cited.