A Meta-analysis of the External Treatment of Traditional Chinese Medicine for Granulomatous Mastitis

Objective: to systematically evaluate the clinical efficacy of external treatment of granulomatous mastitis (including clinical efficiency and the change of mass size). Methods: the computer was used to search CNKI, Wanfang database, VIP net, CBM, PubMed and Embase, and it was used to search and select the clinical randomized controlled trials of treating granulomatous mastitis by external treatment of traditional Chinese medicine, the retrieval time limit was from the establishment of the database to December 2020, and the key words were granulomatous mastitis, external treatment of traditional Chinese medicine. After selecting literatures, extracting datas and evaluating the risk of bias included in the study, the data included in the study were analyzed by RevMan5.3 software. Results: Seven clinical randomized controlled trials were included and 600 patients met the inclusion criteria. Seven of the trials were effective observations, and four of them were tumor size observations. There were 310 cases in the experimental group and 290 cases in the control group. All the included documents were Chinese literature. The results of the study showed that the effective rate of the experimental group (combined with the external treatment of traditional Chinese medicine) for granulomatous mastitis was 95.9%, which was significantly higher than that of the control group (without the external treatment of traditional Chinese medicine). The effective rate was 82.8% [95% CI (1.02, 1.22), Z=2.41, P=0.02<0.05]. The experimental group (combined with the external treatment of traditional Chinese medicine) had a significantly higher degree of the tumor size recovery than the control group (without the external treatment of traditional Chinese medicine) [95% CI (-2.05, -1.83), Z=34.91, P<0.00001]. Conclusion: the external treatment of granulomatous mastitis had a good clinical effect. It not only improved the clinical efficiency, but also effectively reduced the size of breast mass, which was worthy of clinical promotion. However, due to the low quality of clinical trials, further verification was needed.