Traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen treating corona virus disease 2019(COVID-19): Meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

• Main Authors: Mengjie Zeng, Linjun Li, Zhiquan Wu, Raffaele Serra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2020-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7485773/?tool=EBI

Introduction As the global epidemic continues to spread, countries have tapped effective drugs to treat new coronavirus pneumonia. The therapeutic effect of the traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen in this new coronary pneumonia epidemic has attracted attention from all walks of life, and relevant research reports continue to appear. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review of the clinical efficacy and safety of the traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen in the treatment of new coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) (referred to as "new coronary pneumonia"), and evaluated the overall level of research quality. Methods We searched seven databases and retrieved the Chinese Journal Full-text Database (CNKI), Vip Database (VIP), China Biomedicine (SinoMed), Wanfang Database and PubMed, Cochrane Central, EMBASE from October 2019 to May 2020 Literature references. We included randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that tested the efficacy of the traditional Chinese medicine lotus clearing plague in the treatment of new coronavirus pneumonia. The authors extracted data and independently assessed quality. We used Stata15.1 software to analyze the data of randomized trials. Results A total of 2 articles were identified, including 154 patients. All the participating patients were diagnosed with new coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19). The meta-analysis results showed that the disappearance rate of the main clinical symptoms of Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen in the treatment of new coronavirus pneumonia was significantly higher than that of the control group [OR = 3.34, 95% CI (2.06, 5.44), P <0.001]; the disappearance rate of other clinical secondary symptoms is significantly higher than the control group [OR = 6.54, 95% CI (3.59, 11.90), P <0.001]. The duration of fever was significantly lower than that of the control group [OR = -1.04, 95% CI (-1.60, -0.49), P <0.001]. It is confirmed that the traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen treatment improves the clinical effectiveness, and also has certain advantages in relieving cough and fever. Conclusion The treatment of new pneumonia with traditional Chinese medicine lotus clearing plague can be used as an effective therapy to improve the clinical symptoms of new coronary pneumonia. More rigorous design, multi-center, and prospective RCTs are necessary to further determine the effectiveness and safety of the traditional Chinese medicine lotus decoction in the treatment of new pneumonia.