ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to systematically summarize and categorize the syndrome differentiation, medication rules, and acupoint therapy in the domestic traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) literature on type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), such that guidelines and new insights can be provided for future practitioners and researchers.MethodsTaking randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on the treatment of T2DM in TCM as the research theme, we searched for full-text literature in three major clinical databases, including CNKI, Wan Fang, and VIP, published between 1990 and 2020. We then conducted frequency statistics, cluster analysis, association rules extraction, and topic modeling based on a corpus of medical academic words extracted from 3,654 research articles.ResultsThe TCM syndrome types, subjective symptoms, objective indicators, Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture points, and TCM prescriptions for T2DM were compiled based on invigorating the kidney and Qi, nourishing Yin, and strengthening the spleen. Most TCM syndrome differentiation for T2DM was identified as “Zhongxiao” (the lesion in the spleen and stomach) and “Xiaxiao” (the lesion in the kidney) deficiency syndromes, and most medications and acupoint therapies were focused on the “Spleen Channel” and “Kidney Channel.” However, stagnation of liver Qi was mentioned less when compared with other syndromes, which did not have symptomatic medicines.ConclusionThis study provides an in-depth perspective for the TCM syndrome differentiation, medication rules, and acupoint therapy for T2DM and provides practitioners and researchers with valuable information about the current status and frontier trends of TCM research on T2DM in terms of both diagnosis and treatment.

This study established a precision-preferred system specially designed for the data extraction of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) articles, providing foundational data for subsequent clinical article analysis and synthesis of TCM clinical evidence.Information extraction is commonly used in many fields to identify relevant concepts and the relationship between pairs of concepts from the vast information sources. Previous studies that performed information extraction primarily focused on scattering targeted fields to achieve a balance between precision and recall. Therefore, this study aims to create a comprehensive information extraction system for TCM articles. This system will extract all relevant information from research articles on a broad research field, including the 11 diseases that

AimThe aim of this study was to assess the clinical efficacy and safety of Tripterygium-derived glycosides (TG) after 3-month and 6-month of treatments of diabetic nephropathy (DN) and to resolve the conflict between medicine guidance and clinical practice for TG application.MethodsWe conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials involving TG application in treating DN. We extensively searched PubMed, Cochrane Library, CNKI, VIP, Wan-Fang, CBM, Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, and WHO International Clinical Trial Registration Platform till November 2020, along with grey literature for diabetes and all other relevant publications to gather eligible studies. Based on the preset inclusion and exclusion criteria, document screening, quality assessment of methodology, and data extraction was conducted by two researchers independently. The methodological quality was assessed by the Cochrane risk test from the Cochrane Handbook 5.2, and then analyses were performed by Review Manager 5.3 (Rev Man 5.3). The quality of output evidence was classified by GRADE.ResultsThirty-one eligible studies (2764 patients) were included for this meta-analysis. Our study results showed a comparable significant decrease in the 24 h-UTP and blood creatinine levels in DN patients from both 3-month and 6-month TG treatment groups, compared with the routine symptomatic treatment alone. To the contrary of the findings from the included studies, our results showed that the occurrence of serious adverse reaction events was significantly higher in the TG treated group with 6 months of treatment duration compared to that of 3 months of the treatment course. However, the total AR ratio was slightly varied while increasing the percent of severe adverse events. GRADE assessment indicated that the quality of evidence investigating TG-induced adverse reactions was moderate and that for 24 h-UTP and blood creatinine indicators were considerably low.ConclusionCombinatorial treatment regimen including TG can significantly decrease the pathological indicators for DN progression, while it can also simultaneously predispose the patient to a higher risk for developing severe adverse events, as the medicine guidance indicates. Notably, even in 3-month of course duration smaller percent of severe adverse events can get to a fatal high percent and is likely to increase proportionally as the TG treatment continues. This suggests that TG-mediated DN treatment duration should be optimized to even less than 3 continuous months to avoid adverse event onset-associated further medical complications in DN patients. In clinical practice, serious attention should be paid to these severe side-effects even in a course normally considered safe, and importantly more high-quality studies are urgently warranted to obtain detailed insights into the balance between the efficacy and safety profiles of TG application in treating DN.

BACKGROUND In previous studies, researchers only evaluated the scores and grades of TCM clinical randomized controlled works of literature from an overall level, which gave us a general understanding of the overall literature level. OBJECTIVE This study aims to establish a literature quality assessment system specialized for randomized controlled trial (RCT) literature in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). METHODS We combined the general international standard and characteristics of TCM to form a checklist of literature content to be evaluated in terms of basic method information and intervention operations. Then, we established a literature information rating system to classify the focused contents into four categories in terms of varied degree of completeness and accuracy. RESULTS Based on this system, we systematically assessed the quality of 2,776 RCTs in six categories of diseases in TCM. For the basic method information in these RCTs, “outcome indicators” and “participants’ medical sources” were mentioned in most of cases, but they might be described in a vague way, with accurate rates of 60.73% and 74.52% among the cases mentioned these information; “TCM diagnosis and diagnostic basis”, “TCM syndromes”, “randomization methods”, and “blinding” were often missing, with missing rates ranging from 68.58% to 97.48%. For the intervention information in these RCTs, the complete and accurate information for the “treatment group intervention” was higher at 97.83%, compared to 82.68% for the “control group intervention”. Most of the inaccurate information occurred when only the name of an intervention operation or drug was given, but the operation’s specific contents or drug’s composition were not clearly expressed. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggested a serious concern that TCM-related concepts were often missing in trail designs for TCM RCTs, which might impede the development of TCM theories. Also, inaccurate trail designs and intervention descriptions indicated in this study can serve as negative examples for future RCT protocols or reports in TCM to avoid.