Chinese herbal medicine for coronavirus disease 2019: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Xiong, X., Wang, P., Su, K., Cho, W. C., & Xing, Y. · Pharmacological Research · 2020 October

DOI 10.1016/j.phrs.2020.105056

Objective

A systematic review of RCTs was performed to evaluate the current clinical evidence on CHM for the treatment of COVID-19.

Conclusions

This systematic review suggested that CHM is effective in treatment of COVID-19 for improving clinical symptoms, imaging, and laboratory indicators, shortening the course of disease, and reducing the number of severe cases

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Insights

Chinese herbal formulas could be used as potential candidates for treatment of COVID-19.

Our meta-analyses found that comparing CHM group and conventional western medicine group, CHM group has improvements in several clinical parameters including lung CT, clinical cure rate, ranging from mild to critical cases, length of hospital stay, total score of clinical symptoms, fever reduction time, symptom score of fever, number of cough reduction cases, symptom score of cough, number of fatigue reduction cases, symptom score of fatigue, disappearing time of fatigue, TCM syndrome, viral nucleic acid testing, and inflammatory biomarkers (C-reactive protein). Besides, no severe adverse effects was identified by CHM. CHM, especially classical Chinese herbal formulas, could be used as potential candidates for COVID-19 in this battle.