Efficacy and safety of Kuhuang injection in treating viral hepatitis： systematic review and Meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials / 中国中药杂志

ABSTRACT

To systematically evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Kuhuang injection in treating viral hepatitis. Eight electronic databases and clinic trials were searched to collect randomized controlled trials for the effect of Kuhuang injection in the treatment of viral hepatitis. According to the Cochrane Handbook 5.1, two independent reviewers screened out the literatures, extracted data and assessed the quality of thestudies included. RevMan5.3 software was used for the data analysis. A total of 32 articles were included, involving 3 188 patients, including male 1 951 cases (61.2%), female 859 cases (26.9%), and 378 cases of unknown sex (11.9%). All the clinical studies showed a low quality. Due to the complication of diseases and difficulty in intervention measures, most trails were classified by the condition of diseases, and then a descriptive analysis was made. The results showed that the test group was better than the control group in total efficiency of treating severe icteric viral hepatitis, and the test group was advantageous over the control group in jaundice removal and liver function recovery rate in treating icteric hepatitis. In the Meta-analysis on the RCTs for icteric viral hepatitis, the total efficiency of Kuhuang injection + comprehensive treatment group was higher than that of the comprehensive treatment group （RR=1.35, 95%CI=[1.10,1.66], P=0.61）. In addition, when Kuhuang injection was dripped too fast, patients had such adverse reactionsas dizziness, palpitation, nausea, vomiting and skin rash, which could be relieved at a lower dripping speed.Based on the existing evidences, Kuhuang injection had a certain effect in treating viral hepatitis. Most clinic trails did not include viral hepatitis etiology, clinical classification and diversified intervention measures, which resulted in a high clinical heterogeneity and poor comparability between trails. Besides, most trials had a low methodological quality, which affected the authenticity of the results. Therefore, more high-quality, multi-center, large-sample, randomized double-blind controlled trialsarerequired to prove the evidences.