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Evidence for traditional Chinese medication to treat cardiovascular disease

Nature Reviews Cardiology volume 12, page 374 (2015)Cite this article

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We thank Dr Xingjiang Xiong for his Correspondence (Integrating traditional Chinese medicine into Western cardiovascular medicine: an evidence-based approach. Nat. Rev. Cardiol. doi:10.1038/nrcardio.2014.177-c1)1 on our Review article (Traditional Chinese medication for cardiovascular disease. Nat. Rev. Cardiol. 12, 115–122; 2015).2 We would like to take the opportunity to clarify a few issues raised by Dr Xiong.

First, we defined 'TCM' as 'traditional Chinese medication' rather than 'traditional Chinese medicine' in our Review, which was clearly stated in the abstract and introduction.2 This distinction is important because most therapeutic effects of traditional Chinese medicine on cardiovascular diseases have stemmed from Chinese herbal medication, although a number of nonpharmacological therapies (such as dietary supplements, acupuncture, moxibustion, massage, and exercise) exist, with scarce evidence from randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Dr Xiong suggests that “numerous appropriate studies on Chinese herbal medicine for the treatment of hypertension”1 had been omitted from our Review. However, owing to the poor quality of most RCTs of TCM for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, we had to set strict selection criteria for these RCTs. Consequently, only 68 RCTs out of 1,541 eligible reports identified satisfied our criteria. The two studies given as examples by Dr Xiong were excluded from our Review for the following reasons. In the first study, Tong et al. reported blood pressures before and after treatment only in graphs (Figure 3 in their study), but not in numbers and, therefore, we were unable to extract quantitative data from this paper.3 The second study by Xu et al. had a Jadad score of 1,4 which did not meet our inclusion criteria. A major problem with this study was that some individuals were excluded owing to serious adverse reactions and poor treatment compliance before randomization.4

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  1. The Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Remodelling and Function Research, Chinese Ministry of Education and Chinese Ministry of Health, Qilu Hospital, Shandong University, 107 Wen Hua Xi Road, Jinan, 250012, Shandong, China

    Pan-Pan Hao, Fan Jiang, Yu-Guo Chen, Jianmin Yang, Kai Zhang, Ming-Xiang Zhang, Cheng Zhang, Yu-Xia Zhao & Yun Zhang

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Correspondence to Yu-Xia Zhao.

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Hao, PP., Jiang, F., Chen, YG. et al. Evidence for traditional Chinese medication to treat cardiovascular disease. Nat Rev Cardiol 12, 374 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrcardio.2014.177-c2

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