| Background The main causes of human death were common chronic diseases, and the mortality caused by chronic diseases occupied over 60% of all mortality in Chinese. Chinese medicines have been used to treat chronic diseases for thousands of years and there are plenty of practical experiences in clinics. During last decades clinical trials have provided valuable evidence for evaluating efficacy and safety of Chinese medicines in the treatment of chronic diseases. Objective Sponsored by the Hospital Authority of Hong Kong, we performed systematic reviews and meta-analyses on traditional herbal formulae (TF) in the treatment of ten chronic diseases including hypertension, coronary artery disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, liver cancer, liver fibrosis, diabetes mellitus, rheumatoid arthritis, depression and eczema. The main contents of this project included (1) counting TF in the treatment of chronic diseases; (2) investigating the most commonly used TF and their herbs in clinical trials; (3) evaluating the efficacy and safety of commonly used TF; (4) assessing the quality of design and data of clinical trials; (5) reviewing current diagnostic standards and survey results for syndrome-differentiation types of the chronic diseases; etc. Method This study focused on TF because (1) their ingredients, dosages and forms were fixed basically; and some patent TF were recorded in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, in which there were clear standards for their productions and quality controls; (2) the relationship between ingredients and functions had been recognized widely as TF had been clinically applied for a long history; (3) herbal formula was the main style and feature of Chinese medicines in clinical application; and it might reflect essence of basic theory and clinical experience of traditional Chinese medicine. For systematic reviews, a comprehensive searching was performed to retrieve relative randomized controlled trials (RCTs); RevMan software was used to integrate and analyze the data in meta-analyses; Jadad’s scale was used to assess the quality of included RCTs. Result and conclusion The data indicated that TF have been widely used in modern researches including RCTs to treat chronic diseases, and has proven to be effective and safe in clinics. More high-quality RCTs with large sample size and long-term observations should be performed to further assess the TF. The current best evidence from this study should also be valuable to analyze complex mechanisms and herb-herb interactions of formula therapies in traditional Chinese medicine. |