Systematic Analysis and Quality Evaluation for Pharmacoeconomic Studies on Traditional Chinese Medicines

Background: This study aimed to describe the current situation of the published Pharmacoeconomic researches on Traditional Chinese Medicine and evaluate the quality of the researches to analyze existing problem and make suggestions for improvement.Methods: We developed a search strategy, set inclusion and exclusion criteria and searched the articles of Pharmacoecnomic studies on Traditional Chinese Medicine from CNKI, VIP, Wanfang, Sinomed database and Pubmed from their inception to February 2020. Basic information of the literatures was extracted. Then quality of each article was evaluated by using Guidelines for authors and peer reviewers of economic submissions to the BMJ.Results: 430 articles with 433 pharmacoeconomics studies were included. And the information of time of publication, journal, author, funding, diseases, interventions, research design, evaluation methods, cost identification, health outcomes, uncertainty analysis and so on. The overall quality score of the literatures was 0.62 according to the evaluation standard of BMJ guidelines. The highest mark was 0.85 and the lowest mark was 0.38.Conclusions: Quality of pharmacoeconomic studies on traditional Chinese medicines was generally low.There were some problems in the published pharmacoeconomic articles, such as lack of fund support, short research horizon, unclear perspective and research design, misidentification of cost, poor comparability of health outcome and so on. We suggested to develop guidelines for pharmacoeconomic evaluation on Traditional Chinese Medicine to standardize the research procedure and establish reasonable health outcome indicators of Traditional Chinese Medicine to enhance comparability and generalization of studies.