Introduction: Stomach cancer, historically, has a low survival rate advances in curative resection procedures. Objectives: To assess the potential benefits of traditional herbal medicines in conjunction with chemotherapy in postoperative gastric cancer patients in terms of overall survival and disease-free survival. Data Sources: We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, MEDLINE, EMBASE, a Chinese database (CNKI), a Korean database, a Japanese database, AMED, and CINAHL up to September 2016. We summarized survival data from all RCTs. Study Selection: All RCTs of oral traditional medicines for resectable gastric cancer compared with chemotherapy alone were eligible. Data Extraction: Thirteen eligible trials with survival data (1075 patients) were deemed eligible for inclusion. Results: There were 217 documented deaths of the 574 patients assigned to adjuvant traditional medicines groups and 319 documented deaths of the 501 patients assigned to the chemotherapy-only groups. Adjuvant traditional medicines were associated with a statistically significant benefit in terms of overall survival rate (hazard ratio = 0.56; 95% confidence interval = 0.47-0.66; P < .00001) and disease-free survival (hazard ratio = 0.54; 95% confidence interval = 0.43-0.66; P < .00001). Conclusion: Among the RCTs included, the inclusion of postoperative adjuvant traditional medicines was associated with reduced risk of death in gastric cancer patients, when survival rates were compared with the group of patients who received chemotherapy alone. However, most of the included studies utilized are thought to be of low quality, so it would certainly appear that more trials are both advisable and necessary to arrive at correct and convincing conclusions.

Background. Aromatase inhibitors (AIs) are commonly used as adjunctive hormone treatment for early breast cancer patients. The major side effect of AIs is arthralgia, which affects adherence. Previous reviews suggested that acupuncture is effective in the management of cancer-related pain. The aim of this review is to evaluate the effects of acupuncture on arthralgia caused by AIs. Methods. This article examined randomized controlled trials (RCTs) measuring the effects of acupuncture on joint symptoms caused by AIs within 8 medical databases till May 2014. The quality of the articles was evaluated according to the Cochrane risk of bias (ROB) tool. Results. Four RCTs were identified in medical journals. Two studies were conducted with manual acupuncture and 2 studies were electroacupuncture. The range of sample size was between 32 and 67. One RCT showed significant improvement in the acupuncture group compared with the sham control group and another RCT showed a statistical difference between the electroacupuncture and waitlist group. The other 2 studies showed no statistical differences between control and acupuncture groups. Two studies conducted blood analysis to elucidate the mechanism of efficacy of acupuncture for arthralgia. The 2 positive studies had a lower ROB and 2 studies had a high ROB. Conclusions. The systematic review suggests that acupuncture has potential benefits to improve arthralgia caused by AIs. However, further trials of adequate sample size, appropriate control group, and longer follow-up are necessary to investigate the efficacy of acupuncture in AI-induced arthralgia.