Xuebijing in the treatment of patients with sepsis

Background There are more than 18 million patients diagnosed with sepsis every year. In China, Xuebijing (XBJ) injection is a traditional medicine that is widely used in the treatment of sepsis. However, the efficacy of XBJ in treatment of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) remains unclear. This meta-analysis was to evaluate the clinical efficacy of XBJ based on randomized case-control studies. Methods PubMed, Cochrane, Embase, Wanfang, CNKI, and WeiPu (VIP) databases were searched to identify all the relative randomized case-control. The latest research was done in June, 2016. Relative risks (RR), weighted mean difference (WMD) along with 95% confidence interval (95%CI) were used to analyze the main outcomes. Statistical analysis was performed using STATA 10.0 (TX, USA). The qualities of the involved articles were accessed by the Jadad scale. Results Forty-nine randomized case-control studies met the inclusion and exclusion criteria, with 1861 patients in the control group and 2023 patients in the XBJ group. Compared with the conventional therapy, XBJ injection could significantly reduce the APACHE-IIscore (WMD: − 3.70, 95%CI: − 4.31-[− 3.09]), PCT (WMD: − 1.26 μg/L, 95%CI: − 1.63 μg/L-[− 0.88 μg/L]), WBC (WMD: − 1.48 × 109/L, 95%CI: − 2.03 × 109/L-[− 0.94 × 109/L]), CRP (WMD: − 24.38 mg/L, 95%CI:− 30.49 mg/L-[− 18.26 mg/L]), NEU (WMD: − 4.68, 95%CI: − 8.32-[− 1.04]), T0(WMD: − 0.50, 95%CI: − 0.92-[− 0.07]). The 28-day mortality of the XBJ group was significantly lower than the control group (RR: 0.51; 95%CI: 0.44–0.59). Conclusion XBJ injection has a significant clinical efficacy in the therapy of patients with sepsis. However, there is a need for more randomized, lager-sample size, high-quality, and multicenter studies to confirm the extract efficacy of XBJ injection.