Bingpian is a time‐honored herb in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). It is an almost pure chemical with a chemical composition of (+)‐borneol and has been historically used as a topical analgesic for millennia. However, the clinical efficacy of topical borneol lacks stringent evidence‐based clinical studies and verifiable scientific mechanism. We examined the analgesic efficacy of topical borneol in a randomized, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled clinical study involving 122 patients with postoperative pain. Topical application of borneol led to significantly greater pain relief than placebo did. Using mouse models of pain, we identified the TRPM8 channel as a molecular target of borneol and showed that topical borneol‐induced analgesia was almost exclusively mediated by TRPM8, and involved a downstream glutamatergic mechanism in the spinal cord. Investigation of the actions of topical borneol and menthol revealed mechanistic differences between borneol‐ and menthol‐induced analgesia and indicated that borneol exhibits advantages over menthol as a topical analgesic. Our work demonstrates that borneol, which is currently approved by the US FDA to be used only as a flavoring substance or adjuvant in food, is an effective topical pain reliever in humans and reveals a key part of the molecular mechanism underlying its analgesic effect.

Objectives: Recent years have witnessed some controversial viewpoints in clinical and basic research, which exert a great influence on the research trend of acute pancreatitis (AP). We aimed to analyze the literature on AP by metrology, co-occurrence, co-citation, and visualization, and to explore the research status and trend in this field in the past 5 years. Methods: The relevant literature collected in Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database from 2015 to 2019 was searched using “acute pancreatitis” as the title word, and the co-occurrence analysis of authors, institutions, countries, and keywords was carried out by using CiteSpace V. On this basis, the keywords were clustered and analyzed by using VOSviewer 1.6.8 and Carrot 2 software, and a visual map was drawn. Results: A total of 2035 articles were included, with an average annual volume of more than 400. The high-yield authors were mainly Chinese, among which Li WQ was the most prominent. Most of these articles were from universities and institutions of high-yielding countries including China, the United States, and India. The main sources of journals were professional journals, among which Pancreas and Pancreatology have the most literature collection volume (both over 100), including clinical and basic research. Among the funds, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and NIH were the main 2 sponsors. Disciplinary attributes involved multiple subjects such as gastroenterology, internal medicine, and surgery. Keyword co-occurrence and clustering results showed that the classification, mortality, and risk factors of AP were still more concerned, and the research trend of this disease was the molecular mechanism of the severity of AP. Conclusions: CiteSpace can be used to analyze the knowledge graph of AP, to show its development status initially and intuitively, and to provide a reference for topic content and its further development.

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Background. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common health condition affecting senile people and leads to severe cognitive dysfunctions. Acupuncture has been shown to be a possible alternative natural remedy for AD in some animal studies. Objective. To perform a systematic review to identify the effect of verum-acupuncture compared with sham-acupuncture on learning and memory performance among animal models of AD. Methods. Experimental animal studies of treating AD via verum- and sham- acupuncture were searched in nine electronic databases, including Sciverse ScienceDirect, PubMed, Springer, Ebsco Medline, AMED, EMBASE (Elsevier), Scopus (Elsevier), PsycINFO (ProQuest), and OVID from the dates of the databases’ inception to June 2019. The Morris water maze test was considered as an outcome measure. The software Revman 5.3 and Stata 16.0 were used to conduct the meta-analysis. Heterogeneity was examined by using I2 statistics. The publication bias was assessed via Begg’s test by Stata 16.0. Results. Twelve studies involving 229 animals met the inclusion criteria. Most of the studies had a moderate quality according to SYRCLE's risk of bias tool for animal studies. The results of the meta-analysis indicated that verum-acupuncture could reduce the escape latency (MD = −12.90, 95% CI (−17.08, −8.71), p<0.001) and increase the time spent in the original platform quadrant (MD = 7.28, 95% CI (4.23, 10.33), p<0.001) and frequency of the crossing former platform (MD = 2.01, 95% CI (1.53, 2.50), p<0.001) compared with the sham-acupuncture. Conclusions. Acupuncture is effective in improving cognitive functions in AD animal models, and this benefit is more than just a placebo effect. Further clinical trials are needed to confirm the findings.

Objective: Shugan Hewei therapy (SHT) acts to soothe the liver and harmonize the stomach. It is a classical traditional Chinese medicine method widely used in China to treat chronic atrophic gastritis (CAG) due to liver qi invading the stomach. However, the clinical effects of SHT remain unclear. We aimed to evaluate the overall clinical effective rate and safety of SHT in treating CAG.Methods: We used the Jadad scale and Cochrane Collaboration risk of bias tool to evaluate the methodological quality of studies investigating SHT. Eight medical databases were searched to identify relevant studies. After data extraction and quality evaluation, 27 randomized controlled trials, including 2,441 patients, were considered eligible for analysis. No serious heterogeneity or publication bias was observed across the included studies. We used Revman 5.3 statistical software to evaluate the general clinical effective rate and safety of SHT.Results: The results showed that SHT was more effective (RR=1.25; 95% CI [1.20, 1.29]; P<0.01) and safer (MD=0.24, 95% CI [0.08, 0.75]; P<0.01) than control interventions comprising western medicine, Chinese patent medicine, and/or western medicine + Chinese patent medicine. Compared with the control interventions, SHT resulted in greater improvements in the symptom scores for stomach distension and stomachache, serum gastrin level, histopathologic changes, Helicobacter pylori (HP) inhibition rate, and gastric mucosal inflammation. Conclusion: SHT was more effective and safer than control interventions for CAG.