Evaluation of the Adjuvant Efficacy of Natural Herbal Medicine on COVID-19: A Retrospective Matched Case-Control Study

ABSTRACT

Since the outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Hubei province, the epidemic scale has increased rapidly, and no effective antiviral drug therapy has been identified yet. This study aimed to evaluate the adjuvant efficacy of Natural Herbal Medicine (NHM) combined with Western medicine in the treatment of COVID-19. We performed a retrospective, 11 matched, case-control study of the first cohort of hospitalized COVID-19-confirmed cases (January 17, 2020 to January 28, 2020). A total of 22 of the 36 confirmed patients were included in this study, split into two groups of 11 the NHM group (NHM combined standard Western medicine treatment) and control group (standard Western medicine treatment alone). All patients received appropriate supportive care and regular clinical and laboratory monitoring. Main evaluation indicators included improvement of clinical symptoms such as fever, cough and diarrhea after hospitalization;pathogen nucleic acid test result of respiratory tract and fecal specimens of the patient after hospitalization, and change of chest CT examination after hospitalization. The duration of fever in the NHM group (3.4+/-2.4 days) was significantly shorter than that in the control group (5.6+/-2.2 days) (p=0.03). During the whole hospitalization period, the number of cases with diarrhea in the NHM group (two cases) was less than that in the control group (eight cases) (p=0.03). Compared with the control group (7.5+/-1.6), the duration for improvement (DI) of chest CT in the NHM group (5.6+/-2.3) was significantly shorter (p=0.04). Our results suggest that NHM could improve the clinical symptoms of COVID-19 patients and may be effective in treating COVID-19;thus, a larger, prospective, randomized, controlled clinical trial should be conducted to further evaluate the adjuvant efficacy of NHM in the treatment of COVID-19.