Objective To assess the effects and possible adverse reactions of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in treating arteriosclerosis obliterans.
Methods Materials were collected with both electronic retrieval including EMbase (1978 to October 2009), OVID-MEDLINE (1950 to October 2009), Cochrane Controlled Trials Register (Issue 3, 2009), Current Controlled Trials, The National Research Register, CBM (1983 to September 2009), CNKI (1995 to September 2009), Wanfang Data (1994 to 2009), and VIP Data (1989 to 2009), and manual retrieval of related journals. All the retrievals were published before November 10, 2009 without limitation of languages. The quality of included studies was evaluated, and meta-analysis was conducted with RevMan 5.0.2 software.
Results A total of 10 included studies were all randomized controlled trials, including 837 patients, and the sample size of each study was from 36 to 260 cases. Because both Chinese medicines and control drugs used in studies were different from each other, the effect size of each study can only be singley described and newly calculated. Most included studies showed that, the effects of TCM on cure rate, total effective rate and decrease of TC and TG were similar to that of aspirin, acipimox, prostaglandin E1; a few studies showed the effect of TCM was much better; one study on side effect showed that, TCM was less than western medicine.
Conclusion The evidences of TCM effects in treating arteriosclerosis obliterans is quite limited, which has to be strengthened by more studies of high quality.
Citation： HOU Junjie,LI Gouxin,WU Taixiang,WANGJing,LI Shizheng. Effects and Safety of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Treating Arteriosclerosis Obliterans: A Systematic Review. Chinese Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, 2010, 10(9): 1110-1117. doi: 10.7507/1672-2531.20100552 Copy