ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of various drug therapy methods for treating oral submucous fibrosis (OSF) in terms of increasing mouth opening, reducing VAS score, decreasing lesion area, minimizing side effects, and determining effective proportion. METHOD: A database search was conducted. Only randomized clinical trials were included, and Cochrane checklist was used for assessing the risk of bias. Stata.17 software was employed and effective treatment ranking was used. RESULTS: Thirty-one RCT studies, with a total of 2986 patients, were included in the period of 2010-2022. The combination of oral Chinese herbal medicine formulas (OC) and intralesional Salvia miltiorrhiza (ISM) was found to be the most effective treatment in improving mouth opening. For reducing the burning pain, the combination of intralesional steroids (IS) and oral Salvia miltiorrhiza (OSM) was found to be more effective than the others. In terms of lesion area, IS combined with OC was more effective than the others. IS combined with ISM had the highest effective proportion while having the lowest incidence of side effects which mentioned the incidence of side effects. CONCLUSION: This study indicates that OC and SM can be employed by clinicians for treating OSF effectively.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The toxicity and side effects caused by adjuvant chemotherapy (ACT) after radical surgery for lung adenocarcinoma (LAC) lead to early termination frequently. This study was conducted to provide an objective basis for the effect of Chinese herbal medicine formulas (CHMFs) combined with chemotherapy in reducing toxicity and enhancing efficacy of ACT. METHOD: From February 17th, 2012 to March 20th, 2015, 233 patients from 7 hospitals diagnosed with LAC in IB~IIIA stage were randomly assigned into ACT + CHMF group (116 patients) and ACT + placebo group (117 patients). CHMF was taken orally until the end of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy-related toxic, side effects were investigated as the primary outcome. Disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) were used as the secondary outcome. RESULTS: At one week following chemotherapy, the incidence of dry mouth, diarrhea and thrombocytopenia significantly decreased in CHMF group (P = 0.017, P = 0.033, P = 0.019, respectively). At two weeks following chemotherapy, fatigue and diarrhea were more obvious in the placebo group (P = 0.028, P = 0.025, respectively). In addition, patients in the CHMF group showed an increase in median DFS from 37.1 to 51.5 months compared with placebo group although there was no statistical significance (P = 0.16). In the stage IB subgroup, the CHMF group had a significantly better DFS (HR (95% CI) = 0.53 (0.28-0.99), P = 0.046). There was no significant difference in OS between the groups (P = 0.72). CONCLUSION: For patients with LAC, ACT combined with CHMF after radical surgery can prolong the DFS time especially in the early stage, and reduces the chemotherapy-related toxic and side effects. TRIAL REGISTRATION: NCT01441752. Registered 14 July, 2011.
ABSTRACT
Recent trends suggest that Chinese herbal medicine formulas (CHM formulas) are promising treatments for complex diseases. To characterize the precise syndromes, precise diseases and precise targets of the precise targets between complex diseases and CHM formulas, we developed an artificial intelligence-based quantitative predictive algorithm (DeepTCM). DeepTCM has gone through multilevel model calibration and validation against a comprehensive set of herb and disease data so that it accurately captures the complex cellular signaling, molecular and theoretical levels of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). As an example, our model simulated the optimal CHM formulas for the treatment of coronary heart disease (CHD) with depression, and through model sensitivity analysis, we calculated the balanced scoring of the formulas. Furthermore, we constructed a biological knowledge graph representing interactions by associating herb-target and gene-disease interactions. Finally, we experimentally confirmed the therapeutic effect and pharmacological mechanism of a novel model-predicted intervention in humans and mice. This novel multiscale model opened up a new avenue to combine "disease syndrome" and "macro micro" system modeling to facilitate translational research in CHM formulas.