Efficacy and Safety of Chinese Medicinal Herbs for the Treatment of Hyperuricemia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Background. Chinese medicinal herbs may be useful for the treatment of hyperuricemia, but there has been no systematic assessment of their efficacy and safety. Objectives. To systematically assess the efficacy and safety of Chinese medicinal herbs for the treatment of hyperuricemia. Methods. Six electronic databases were searched from their inception to December 2015. Randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) were included. Cochrane criteria were applied to assess the risk of bias. Data analysis was performed using RevMan software version 5.2. Results. Eleven RCTs with 838 patients were included. There was no significant difference in serum uric acid between Chinese medicinal herbs and traditional Western medicine (SME: 0.19, 95% CI: −0.04 to 0.43; p = 0.10). In terms of overall efficacy, the Chinese medicinal herbs were significantly superior to Western medicine (RR: 1.11; 95% CI: 1.04 to 1.17; p = 0.0007). The Chinese medicinal herbs were better than Western medicine in reducing the adverse reactions (RR: 0.30; 95% CI: 0.15 to 0.62; p = 0.001). And all these funnel plots showed unlikelihood of publishing bias. Conclusions. The results indicate that Chinese medicinal herbs may have greater overall efficacy with fewer adverse drug reactions, although the evidence is weak owing to the low methodological quality and the small number of the included trials.

Production Inhibition and Excretion Promotion of Urate by Fucoidan from Laminaria japonica in Adenine-Induced Hyperuricemic Mice

“…Hyperuricemia is a metabolic disease resulting from an imbalance between the endogenous production and renal excretion of uric acid, and correlates closely with hypertension, cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, diabetes mellitus, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and renal disorders [6,7]. Due to imperfections of current clinical agents, natural products and Chinese traditional medicines are becoming important resources to screen for therapeutic drugs without side-effects for the treatment of hyperuricemia [6,7,8]. Fucoidan is a kind of natural sulfated polysaccharide from brown seaweed, and has been proven to have multiple bioactivities, including hepatoprotection [22,23,24] and renal protection [14,15,16,17,18,19].…”

“…Hence, searching for new effective and nontoxic agents to replace the current chemicals is a critical task for the treatment of hyperuricemia. Natural products and Chinese traditional medicines have been considered to be good options [7,8].…”

The Impact of Natural Product Dietary Supplements on Patients with Gout: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

“…Numerous articles have been written describing the important role and safety of NPDS therapies in patients with gout [15,16,[30][31][32][33][34]; but until now, no review has quantitatively synthesized the relevant RCTs. To our knowledge, this review is the first overview of available RCTs investigating the efficacy and safety of NPDS approaches in gout management.…”

A Review of the Potential of Phytochemicals from Prunus africana (Hook f.) Kalkman Stem Bark for Chemoprevention and Chemotherapy of Prostate Cancer

“…In this review, we modified the data search process used by Kim et al [ 47 ] and Lin et al [ 48 ] to obtain information from original peer reviewed articles published in scientific journals, with a focus on the botany, distribution, and potential of P. africana for cancer chemoprevention and chemotherapy. We carefully searched electronic literature databases including but not limited to PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar for relevant records for a period from 1995 to 2016.…”