Gao L, et al. - A systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted to assess the effectiveness of Wenjing decoction for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea. The outcomes supported the clinical utilization of Wenjing decoction for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea. However, the quality of the proof for this finding was low because of a high risk of bias in the included studies. Therefore, well-designed randomized controlled trials are still needed to further assess the effectiveness of Wenjing decoction for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea.

Methods

• For this research, they used eight databases.
• The Cochrane Library, the Web of Science, PubMed, EMBASE, the Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), the Chinese Scientific Journal Database, and the Wan-fang Database were used in this study.
• The following search terms were used: (Wenjing decoction OR Wenjing formula OR Wenjing tang) AND (primary dysmenorrhea OR dysmenorrhea OR painful menstruation) AND (randomized controlled trial).
• There was no dialect limitation used.

Results

• In this meta-analysis, a total of 18 studies including 1736 patients were included.
• Wenjing decoction was appeared to be significantly better than nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for the improvement of primary dysmenorrhea according to the clinical effective rate (RR 1.41, 95% CI 1.24-1.61), the visual analogue scale (MD -1.77, 95% CI -2.69 to -0.84), and the pain scale for dysmenorrhea (MD -1.81, 95% CI -2.41 to -1.22).