Effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicineas as an Adjunct Therapy for Refractory Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review and Meta Analysis

Although recent studies focused on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for the treatment of refractory schizophrenia have reported that it may be beneficial, there is still lack of convincing evidence and critical meta-analytic work regarding its effectiveness as an adjunctive therapy. Therefore, we...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inScientific reports Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. 6230 - 9
Main Authors Wei, Yan-Yan, Lin, Wan-Fu, Zhang, Tian-Hong, Tang, Yun-Xiang, Wang, Ji-Jun, Zhong, Mao-Feng
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Nature Publishing Group UK 18.04.2018
Nature Publishing Group
Subjects
692/308/409
692/699/476/1799
Antipsychotics
Chinese medicine
Clinical trials
Extrapyramidal system
Herbal medicine
Humanities and Social Sciences
Mental disorders
Meta-analysis
multidisciplinary
Schizophrenia
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Side effects
Systematic review
Traditional Chinese medicine
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Although recent studies focused on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for the treatment of refractory schizophrenia have reported that it may be beneficial, there is still lack of convincing evidence and critical meta-analytic work regarding its effectiveness as an adjunctive therapy. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to investigate the effectiveness of TCM in combination with antipsychotics for refractory schizophrenia. Fourteen articles involving 1725 patients published as of December 2016 were included which compared antipsychotic therapies to either TCM alone, or TCM as an adjunctive therapy. TCM was observed to have beneficial effects on aspects of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) including total score changes and negative score changes, as well as clinical effects estimated with PANSS or the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). The changes in extrapyramidal side effects (RSESE) scores from baseline to the end of the treatment period were similar in two groups of related trials. TCM was also reported to mitigate some anti-psychotic related side-effects and overall, TCM adjuvant therapy was generally safe and well tolerated. While, the results indicated the potential utility of TCM as an alternative adjunctive therapeutic for refractory schizophrenia treatment, there remains a need for further high-quality studies.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-24547-0