Abstract
Traditional Chinese medicine has long been applied to various diseases in China for a few thousand years. In recent years, its market has gradually developed from Asian countries to Western countries. At present, due to the lack of evidence-based medicine research, the effect of traditional Chinese medicine on the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease remains unclear. In evaluating the efficacy and safety of drugs, randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) are recognized as the gold standard for testing the effectiveness and safety of treatments and could offer the best evidence for the formulation of clinical treatment guidelines. Although traditional Chinese medicine has long been used to treat cardiovascular diseases, the research on the application of RCT to test the combination of traditional Chinese and Western medicine therapy or single traditional Chinese medicine therapy started late, and the number is comparably small. In order to summarize and objectively evaluate the research results of integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine in intervention of cardiovascular diseases, we reviewed the literature of RCTs in this field by searching some Chinese and English databases and put forward some suggestions for the future development and research of traditional Chinese medicine.
Highlights
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become the leading cause of death worldwide in recent decades, accounting for 17.3 million deaths per year globally, the number of which may rise to 23.6 million by 2030 [1]
We summarize the current status and progress of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on the efficacy and safety of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in the treatment of some CVD risk factors or 2 major types of CVDs: atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), which is defined as coronary artery disease [4], and chronic heart failure
Discussion rough the literature search of clinical trials of traditional Chinese medicine in recent years, we found that the scale and standardization of trials in recent years have been improved, but there are still some limitations: (1) ere are various interventions in TCM, and the evidence for the efficacy of monotherapy remains insufficient
Summary
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become the leading cause of death worldwide in recent decades, accounting for 17.3 million deaths per year globally, the number of which may rise to 23.6 million by 2030 [1]. In the practice of diagnosis and treatment of CVDs in China, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has had wide applications for many years due to relatively insufficient medical treatment with Western medicine. TCM is often criticized or rejected because that few high-quality evidencebased testimonies can meet evaluation criteria To this end, a large number of basic and clinical studies have been performed to validate the efficacy of TCM. We included clinical research literature according to the following criteria: (1) Patients are diagnosed with CVDs we mentioned above. Reports complied following criteria were excluded: (1) nonrandomized controlled or nonblinded trials. Searched the database to obtain a total of 3249 related literatures (3078 in Chinese and 171 in English).
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