Systematic review of traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen in the treatment of new coronavirus pneumonia

Objective To systematically evaluate the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen in the treatment of novel Coronavirus Pneumonia (NCP). Methods The databases of PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Central, CBM, CNKI, Wanfang and VIP were searched by computer. The clinical studies of Lianhua Qingwen combined with conventional medicine for NCP were collected. The search time was established from each database to February 2020. Meta analysis was performed using Stata 12.0 software. Results Three trials were finally included in a total of 138 patients. Meta analysis results showed that Lianhuaqingwen combined with conventional drugs had a better disappearance rate of main symptoms (fever, cough, fatigue) and other symptoms (chest tightness, dyspnea, and loss of appetite) of NCP than conventional drugs. Conclusion The results of this systematic review show that, compared with conventional drugs, the Lianhuaqingwen combined group can better alleviate the main symptoms of patients, and at the same time, the symptoms of dyspnea and loss of appetite can be relieved. However, due to the low quality of the included literature, a high-quality, multi-center, large-sample, randomized, double-blind, controlled trial is needed to verify. *Correspondence to: Qing Ren, Department of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China, E-mail: renqing@hku.hk