Tripterygium wilfordii Hook. f. Preparations for Rheumatoid Arthritis: An Overview of Systematic Reviews

OBJECTIVES: To summarize the quantity and quality of evidence for using Tripterygium wilfordii Hook. f. (TwHF) preparations in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to find the reasons of the disparity by comprehensively appraising the related systematic reviews (SRs). METHODS: We performed an overview of evidence for the effectiveness and safety of TwHF preparations for patients with RA. We searched seven literature databases from inception to July 15, 2021. We included SRs of TwHF preparations in the treatment of RA. Four tools were used to evaluate the reporting quality, methodological quality, risk of bias, and the certainty of evidence for the included SRs, which are the PRISMA, the AMSTAR-2, the ROBIS, and the GRADE approach. RESULTS: We included 27 SRs (with 385 studies and 33,888 participants) for this overview. The AMSTAR-2 showed that 19 SRs had critically low methodological quality and the remaining 8 had low methodological quality. The rate of overlaps was 68.31% (263/385), and the CCA (corrected covered area) was 0.53, which indicated the degree of overlap is slight. Based on the assessment of ROBIS, all 27 SRs were rated as low risk in phase 1; one SR was rated as low risk in domain 1, 9 SRs were in low risk in domain 2, 16 SRs were in low risk in domain 3, and 16 SRs were in low risk in domain 4 in phase 2; 7 SRs were rated as low risk in phase 3. Among 27 items of PRISMA, 15 items were reported over 70% of compliance, the reporting quality of 16 SRs was rated as “fair,” and 11 were “good.” Using GRADE assessment, moderate quality of evidence was found in 5 outcomes, and 5 outcomes were low quality. CONCLUSION: The use of TwHF preparations for the treatment of RA may be clinically effective according to the moderate-quality evidence. There are methodological issues, risk of bias, and reporting deficiencies still needed to be improved. SRs with good quality and further randomized clinical trials that focus on clinical important outcomes are needed.