Traditional Chinese Medicine Strategy for Patients with Tourette Syndrome Based on Clinical Efficacy and Safety: A Meta-Analysis of 47 Randomized Controlled Trials

OBJECTIVE: Although increasing evidence reveals the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and its safety on Tourette Syndrome (TS) patients, whether TCM is indeed improving TS remains unclear. The purpose of the current study is to perform a meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy and safety of TCM on treating TS patients. METHOD: An elaborate search strategy was conducted based on several databases including Medline, Embase, Cochrane, Web of Science, CINAHL, CBM, VIP, CNKI, and Wanfang Data in order to identify the relevant randomized controlled trials (RCTs) from their inception to as late as May 1st, 2020. General information and data needing analysis were extracted simultaneously for the necessity of various analyses such as descriptive analysis and metaquantitative analysis. RESULTS: Forty-seven trials with 5437 TS patients in total were eventually included according to our criteria. All trials were conducted in China, and the publication years ranged from 2004 to 2017. In terms of clinical efficacy, clinical symptoms of patients with TCM were more likely to be improved compared with the control group (odds ratio, OR = −1.29, 95% confidence interval, CI: -2.54 to -0.06, I(2) = 0.00%). As to the outcome of recurrence rate, the pooled results revealed that the TCM group was more inclined to stabilize the recurrence (OR = 0.44, 95% CI: 0.24 to 0.78, I(2) = 0.00%). Similar results were observed in adverse reaction (OR = 0.32, 95% CI: 0.24 to 0.43, I(2) = 32.90%). CONCLUSION: The results of our study recommend applying TCM to treat TS patients for better efficacy and safety. Results need to be interpreted cautiously due to certain limitations in our study.