Cohort Studies on Chronic Non-communicable Diseases Treated With Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Bibliometric Analysis
Open Access
- 19 March 2021
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Frontiers Media SA in Frontiers in Pharmacology
Abstract
Cohort studies investigating the treatment of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) have considerably accumulated in recent years. To systematically and for the first time present the achievements and dilemmas of cohort studies, strict inclusion and exclusion criteria were used to search publications from the Web of Science, PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure databases for cohort studies on NCDs with TCM since the establishment of these databases. Information on the year of publication, exposure factors, diseases, and outcome indicators was obtained, and a literature quality assessment and bibliometric descriptive analysis were conducted. A total of 182 published articles involving 1,615,106 cases were included. There were 110 non-prospective cohort studies and 72 prospective cohort studies. The diseases involved in the cohort studies were, in the order of the number of published articles, malignant tumors (82 articles, 45.05%), cardiovascular diseases (35 articles, 19.23%), neurological diseases (29 articles, 15.93%), chronic kidney diseases (16 articles, 8.79%), liver cirrhosis (8 articles, 4.40%), diabetes mellitus (8 articles, 4.40%), and chronic respiratory diseases (4 articles, 2.20%). The study participants were mainly from China (177 articles, 97.25%). The number of cohort studies increased significantly in the last 5 years (65 articles, 35.71%), and following the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) literature quality evaluation, the number of articles that received a score of four to five was high (116 articles, 63.73%), and the overall quality needs to be improved. The application of cohort studies in the field of TCM for the prevention and treatment of NCDs has developed rapidly in the past 5 years, focusing on the prevention and treatment of tumors as well as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. However, the design and implementation of cohort studies still have considerable limitations. To provide more clinical evidence, researcher should actively cooperate with evidence-based methodologists and standardize the implementation of cohort studies.Funding Information
- National Outstanding Youth Science Fund Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China
This publication has 67 references indexed in Scilit:
- Newcastle-Ottawa Scale: comparing reviewers’ to authors’ assessmentsBMC Medical Research Methodology, 2014
- Adjunctive traditional Chinese medicine therapy improves survival in patients with advanced breast cancer: A population‐based studyCancer, 2014
- The Framingham Heart Study and the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease: a historical perspectiveThe Lancet, 2013
- A global view on the development of non communicable diseasesPreventive Medicine, 2012
- Colon Cancer Survival With Herbal Medicine and Vitamins Combined With Standard Therapy in a Whole-Systems ApproachIntegrative Cancer Therapies, 2011
- A Randomized, Double‐blind, Placebo‐controlled Study to Evaluate the Efficacy and Tolerability of Fufang Danshen (Salvia miltiorrhiza) as Add‐on Antihypertensive Therapy in Taiwanese Patients with Uncontrolled HypertensionPhytotherapy Research, 2011
- Critical evaluation of the Newcastle-Ottawa scale for the assessment of the quality of nonrandomized studies in meta-analysesEuropean Journal of Epidemiology, 2010
- Cohort study on the effect of a combined treatment of traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine on the relapse and metastasis of 222 patients with stage II and III colorectal cancer after radical operationChinese Journal of Integrated Medicine, 2008
- The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) statement: guidelines for reporting observational studiesJournal of Clinical Epidemiology, 2008