Oral traditional Chinese medicine for vestibular Migraine: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Objective: Vestibular migraine is a common vertigo disease, and studies confirm that Traditional Chinese medical has unique advantages in treating vestibular migraine. However, there is no unified clinical treatment method and lacks objective outcome indicators. This study aims to provide evidence-based medical evidence by systematically evaluating the clinical efficacy of oral TCM in treating vestibular migraine.

Methods: Search journals related with clinical randomized controlled trials of oral traditional Chinese medicine for vestibular migraine in databases includes China Academic Journals full-text database (CNKI), China Biology Medicine disc (CBM), China Science and Technology Journal Database(VIP), Wangfang Medicine Online(WANFANG), PubMed, Cochrane library, EMBASE, MEDLINE, and OVID databases from their inceptions until September 2022. The quality of the included RCTs was assessed using the Cochrane risk of bias tool, then conduct the Meta analysis by using RevMan5.3.

Results: There were 179 papers left after selection. Moreover, according to the literature inclusion and exclusion criteria, 158 studies were filtered and the remaining 21 articles would be considered in this paper, which include 1650 patients in total and 828 of them were in the therapy group and 822 of them were in the control group.Furthermore,the therapy group outperformed the control group in terms of the total efficiency rate and TCM syndrome score, and the difference is statistically significant(P < 0.01). The number of vertigo attacks and the duration of each vertigo decreased compared to the control group, which difference is also statistically significant (P < 0.01). The funnel chart of the total efficiency rate was approximately symmetric and publication bias was low.

Conclusion: The oral traditional Chinese medicine is an effective way for vestibular migraine, which would help with the clinical symptoms, reduce the TCM syndrome score, decrease the number of vertigo attacks and the duration of each vertigo, and improve life quality of patients.