Developing a core outcome set of Traditional Chinese Medicine on Asthma

Asthma is one of the common chronic respiratory diseases, belonging to the category of "wheezing" and "syndrome characterized by dyspnea" in traditional Chinese medicine, with approximately 300 million patients worldwide. Its acute onset is the main cause of emergency and hospitalization treatment for patients. At present, therapeutic evaluation indicators such as lung function, number of acute exacerbations, number of hospitalizations, and mortality are widely used in clinical practice to determine the outcome of asthma. Research has shown that traditional Chinese medicine, moxibustion, acupuncture, acupoint application, and thread embedding can effectively alleviate symptoms and have a definite therapeutic effect; However, the research on the core indicator set by clinical experts in traditional Chinese medicine is still in its early stages. The evaluation methods for the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine in preventing and treating asthma are relatively chaotic and the standards are inconsistent, lacking a consistent and systematic efficacy evaluation method. This further leads to low reproducibility between clinical and scientific research, and difficulty in comparing efficacy horizontally, reducing the utilization of data between original studies and hindering the evidence-based development of traditional Chinese medicine and providing high-quality evidence for decision-making. Therefore, it is necessary to establish an add-on core set of indicators for traditional Chinese medicine treatment of asthma, based on the asthma core indicator set already released by Western medicine. This will fill the gap in traditional Chinese medicine in this regard, standardize the efficacy evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine treatment of asthma, improve the quality of data utilization in original research, and transform into evidence-based decision-making.

Contributors

Principal investigator:
Minghang Wang, Jiansheng Li, Suyun Li, Bohan Niu, Jianya Yang, The First Affiliated Hospital of Henan University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Henan, China

Other contributors: Di Zhao, Gaoming Wang, Xiaosheng Dong, Henan University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Henan, China

Further Study Information

Current Stage: Ongoing
Date: December 2023 - September 2025
Funding source(s): Funding source to be confirmed


Health Area

Disease Category: Lungs & airways

Disease Name: Asthma

Target Population

Age Range: 18 - 100

Sex: Either

Nature of Intervention: Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy, Traditional Chinese Medicine

Stakeholders Involved

- Clinical experts
- Consumers (patients)
- Journal editors
- Methodologists
- Pharmaceutical industry representatives
- Researchers

Study Type

- COS for clinical trials or clinical research
- COS for practice

Method(s)

- Consensus conference
- Delphi process
- Interview
- Systematic review

(1) Systematic literature review
(2) Qualitative semi-structured interview
(3) Two rounds Delphi Survey
(4) Consensus conference

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