Construction of a Meta-Evidence Prototype Database of Traditional Chinese Medicine Splenogastric Diseases and Its Application in an Automatic Meta-Analysis System

Abstract

Background. Traditional Chinese medicine splenogastric diseases (TCMSDs) are equivalent to digestive system diseases in modern medicine. The forms of clinical evidence of TCMSDs include clinical trials, such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and systematic reviews (SRs). SRs mainly rely on manual operations and have the shortcomings of time consumption and low efficiency; therefore, they cannot meet the needs of rapid clinical decision-making. It is urgent to establish a new and smart form of a database to support the progress of SRs. Methods. We searched and screened all TCMSD RCT reports, in both Chinese and English, and extracted them into meta-evidence through predesigned structural Microsoft Excel tables. All meta-evidence was imported into an online clinical meta-evidence collection and management system after data quality checking. The meta-evidence database of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) splenogastric disease (MED-TCMSD) was then tested as a backend of an automatic meta-analysis system. Results. A total of 405 cases of TCMSD RCTs were processed into meta-evidence. The most common diseases were stomach stuffiness disease, epigastralgia, and chronic atrophic gastritis. Banxiaxiexin decoction and its modifications were the most used interventions. More than half of the cases employed TCM in conjunction with regular therapeutics. The top reported outcomes included clinical effects, adverse events, and TCM syndromes. The MED-TCMSD worked well as a part of the automatic meta-analysis system. Conclusions. We developed and tested a new form of clinical evidence, meta-evidence, for automatic SR and fast evidence-based decision-making. As an example of the MED, the MED-TCMSD can improve the production and updating efficiency of the evidence of TCMSDs. The methods of constructing the MED-TCMSD can be further applied to the development of MEDs of other diseases.