AI Article Synopsis
- The study aimed to evaluate how effective and safe herbal medicines are for treating autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children.
- Thirteen databases were analyzed, resulting in ten randomized controlled trials with 567 participants, showing that herbal treatments combined with standard therapy improved Autism Rating Scale scores, although results varied among studies.
- The findings suggest herbal medicines might be beneficial for ASD treatment, but the evidence is weak due to issues like low quality of studies, diversity in herbal types, and small sample sizes.
Article Abstract
Objective: To summarize and evaluate the efficacy and safety of herbal medicines used for the treatment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children.
Methods: Thirteen electronic databases were searched from their inception to November 2016. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that assessed the efficacy of herbal medicines alone or in combination with other Traditional Chinese Medicine treatments for ASD in children were included. The Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool was used and other data analyses were performed using RevMan (Version 5.3).
Results: Ten RCTs involving 567 patients with ASD were included for qualitative synthesis. In conjunction with conventional therapy, herbal medicines significantly improved the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) score, but the results of effects on total effective rate (TER) were different between the included studies. The use of herbal medicines with integrative therapy improved the CARS score and TER. In the studies that documented adverse events, no serious events were associated with herbal medicines.
Conclusions: The efficacy of herbal medicines for the treatment of ASD appears to be encouraging but was inconclusive owing to low methodological quality, herbal medicine diversity, and small sample size of the examined studies.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5448044 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2017/8614680 | DOI Listing |
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