Benefit of Adjuvant Traditional Herbal Medicine With Chemotherapy for Resectable Gastric Cancer

Stomach cancer, historically, has a low survival rate advances in curative resection procedures.

To assess the potential benefits of traditional herbal medicines in conjunction with chemotherapy in postoperative gastric cancer patients in terms of overall survival and disease-free survival.

We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, MEDLINE, EMBASE, a Chinese database (CNKI), a Korean database, a Japanese database, AMED, and CINAHL up to September 2016. We summarized survival data from all RCTs.

All RCTs of oral traditional medicines for resectable gastric cancer compared with chemotherapy alone were eligible.

Thirteen eligible trials with survival data (1075 patients) were deemed eligible for inclusion.

There were 217 documented deaths of the 574 patients assigned to adjuvant traditional medicines groups and 319 documented deaths of the 501 patients assigned to the chemotherapy-only groups. Adjuvant traditional medicines were associated with a statistically significant benefit in terms of overall survival rate (hazard ratio = 0.56; 95% confidence interval = 0.47-0.66; P < .00001) and disease-free survival (hazard ratio = 0.54; 95% confidence interval = 0.43-0.66; P < .00001).

Among the RCTs included, the inclusion of postoperative adjuvant traditional medicines was associated with reduced risk of death in gastric cancer patients, when survival rates were compared with the group of patients who received chemotherapy alone. However, most of the included studies utilized are thought to be of low quality, so it would certainly appear that more trials are both advisable and necessary to arrive at correct and convincing conclusions.