• DOI:10.1007/s00404-017-4485-7
• Corpus ID: 32573698

Wenjing decoction (herbal medicine) for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea: a systematic review and meta-analysis

@article{Gao2017WenjingD,
  title={Wenjing decoction (herbal medicine) for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea: a systematic review and meta-analysis},
  author={Li-Xing Gao and Chunhua Jia and Hengyi Zhang and Cuilan Ma},
  journal={Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics},
  year={2017},
  volume={296},
  pages={679-689}
}

• Li-Xing Gao, Chunhua Jia, +1 author Cuilan Ma
• Published 8 August 2017
• Medicine
• Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics

PurposeWenjing decoction is a well-accepted traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea in East Asia, but its clinical effectiveness and risk have not been adequately assessed. In this paper, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy of Wenjing decoction for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea.MethodsEight databases were used in our research: the Cochrane Library, the Web of Science, PubMed, EMBASE, the Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), the Chinese Scientific Journal Database, and the Wan-fang Database. The following search terms were used: (Wenjing decoction OR Wenjing formula OR Wenjing tang) AND (primary dysmenorrhea OR dysmenorrhea OR painful menstruation) AND (randomized controlled trial). No language limitation was used.ResultsA total of 18 studies, including 1736 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Wenjing decoction was shown to be significantly better than nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for the improvement of primary dysmenorrhea according to the clinical effective rate (RR 1.41, 95% CI 1.24–1.61), the visual analogue scale (MD −1.77, 95% CI −2.69 to −0.84), and the pain scale for dysmenorrhea (MD −1.81, 95% CI −2.41 to −1.22).ConclusionsThe results supported the clinical use of Wenjing decoction for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea. However, the quality of the evidence for this finding was low due to a high risk of bias in the included studies. Therefore, well-designed randomized controlled trials are still needed to further evaluate the efficacy of Wenjing decoction for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea.