Efficacy of Chinese and Western Medicine on Endometritis in Dairy Cows: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Abstract

Endometritis is a frequent postpartum disease of dairy cows and inflicts considerable distress on the animals and costs to the dairy industry. This study evaluated the clinical efficacy of Chinese and Western Medicine combination treatments for dairy cow endometritis to provide a reference for the prevention and treatment of these infections. This analysis provides new information for veterinary medical research. We used the keywords ‘Chinese and Western Medicine, Traditional and Western Medicine, Chinese herbs, Traditional Chinese Medicine Traditional Medicine, Chinese, Zhong Yi Xue, Chinese Traditional Medicine, Chinese Medicine, Traditional, Endometritis, Metritis and Cow to assess relevant literature sources collected in CNKI, Wanfang, Vepsa, China Patent Information Network, PubMed, Web of Science and other domestic and foreign databases. We utilized Cochrane system instructions to perform a meta-analysis using RevMan 5. 3 and Stata 16.0 software. We identified 13 randomized clinical trials (RCT) involving 847 dairy cows including cows 435 treated with a combination of Chinese and Western Medicine and 412 cows treated with the Western Medicine approach. The effectiveness for the combination therapy was better than that of the control (antibiotic only) where the relative risk was 1.19 with 95% CI (1.12, 1.26) and Z =5.96, P less than 0.01. We found no significant heterogeneity between these studies (I2=0 less than 50%, P =0.50 less than 0.1) and publication bias was absent as investigated through funnel plots and the Egger regression model (P=0.197 greater than 0.05). These results indicated that although the Chinese herbal preparations differed between studies (n=13), when coupled with Western antibiotic treatments the animals recovered faster than did the control Western antibiotic treatments. These randomized control studies indicated that the efficacy of Chinese and Western Medicine on endometritis in dairy cows is greater than that of Western Medicine treatments.