Objective  To evaluate the efficacy and safety of Chinese medicine for the treatment of angina pectoris. Methods  PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library (Issue 11, 2015), VIP, WanFang Data and CNKI databases were used to evaluate the curative effect and safety of proprietary Chinese medicine in the treatment of angina pectoris. The retrieval time was up to November 2015. Two reviewers screened literatures, extracted data and assessed the methodological quality of included studies, and then the GRADE evaluation system was used to assess the quality of evidence. Results  A total of 42 systematic reviews/Meta-analysises were included in the study. There were 15 kinds of proprietary Chinese medicines, and the drugs published most were compound composite salvia. AMSTAR evaluation results showed that the quality of all studies were low. The main problems were: ① no consideration was given to the publication of the inclusion criteria (eg, gray literature); ② only the list of articles included in the study literature was not available; ③ all articles did not describe the relevant conflicts of interest. The results of GRADE systems showed that: ① as to the total effective rate: musk pills (RR=3.44, 95%CI 2.99 to 3.96,P=0.08) and suxiaojiuxin Pills (RR=4.25, 95% CI 3.31 to 5.47,P<0.01) were superior to Western medicine, and the level of evidence was very low. ② As to the ECG changes efficiency rate: Puerarin (RR=3.61, 95% CI 2.95 to 4.42,P=0.05), Musk pill (RR=2.48, 95%CI 2.12 to 2.91,P<0.01) and Shuxuening (RR=1.62, 95% CI 1.33 to1.97,P<0.01) were superior to Western medicine, and the evidence level was low. The level of evidence was low for the remaining effective rate of proprietary Chinese medicine; ③ as to the adverse reactions: the musk Baoxin pill (RR=0.05, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.37,P=0.04) was less than Western medicine, and the evidence level was low. Conclusion  Although the number of systematic reviews of published proprietary Chinese medicines for angina pectoris is high, but the methodological quality and evidence level are low. There are serious defects in the low quality of the original research literature and the systematic evaluation method. We suggest future studies to improve for two aspects: ① reasonable design to reduce the selective bias, to carry out the required clinical trials to reduce the implementation bias, the implementation of multi-center, the sample size of sufficient randomized controlled clinical trials to reduce the number of patients into the group less resulting in the loss of bias, strict implementation of the standard data collection methods to reduce the occurrence of measurement bias; ② in accordance with the requirements of clinical trials to report to improve the report quality of the literature.

Citation： GAO Wei, HU Ming. Overview of systematic reviews on the efficacy and safety of Chinese patent medicine for anti-angina pectoris. Chinese Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, 2017, 17(4): 440-449. doi: 10.7507/1672-2531.201611050 Copy