Efficacy and Safety of Qingfei Paidu Decoction for Patients with COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Backgrounds: Since the outbreak of new coronavirus pneumonia worldwide, there are no specific drugs up to now. In people’s struggle with the disease, more and more clinical practice shows that traditional Chinese medicine has shown an increasingly important role in the outbreak. Among them, Qingfei Paidu decoction (QFPD) has been widely used in China and overseas Chinese, which has good advantages in the treatment of COVID-19. Although some meta-analyses have studied the efficacy of QFPD in the treatment of COVID-19, the inclusion and exclusion criteria of trials in these studies were not strict enough and their results were not consistent. So, the exact efficacy of QFPD for treating COVID-19 was still questionable. Objective: To systematically evaluate the efficacy and safety of QFPD for COVID-19. Methods: A comprehensive literature search of qualified trials using QFPD to treat COVID-19 was conducted in 11 electronic databases, including Medline, Embase, Cochrane Library, PubMed, Web of Science, Springer link, Clinicaltrials.gov, etc. From their establishment to March 1, 2021. Subjects and abstracts of the trials were read in Note Express for preliminary screening, and the full text was read for further screening. Researchers independently extracted the data in duplicate, and the risk of bias of trials was assessed by using the Cochrane collaboration tool, followed by data analysis using Rev Man 5.3. Results: Four trials with 390 participants were included for meta-analysis, revealing that QFPD can effectively shorten the average length of stay in hospital and the time of nucleic acid to turn negative. In terms of adverse reactions, there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups. Conclusions: These results demonstrated that QFPD could effectively treat COVID-19, improve clinical symptoms, shorten hospital stay and nucleic acid negative time, and no obvious adverse reactions have been found. Compared with other meta-analyses of QFPD, this research has some unique features, including its comprehensiveness, the large-scale of its search and its transparent approach, which may provide some new treatment ideas for clinicians. Keywords: Qingfei Paidu decoction; COVID-19; 2019-NcoV; Systematic review; Meta-analysis