Abstract

Vascular dementia is a serious neurological disease associated with reduced perfusion of the brain. No western drugs have been approved for the treatment of vascular dementia. Oral Chinese drugs are commonly employed for vascular dementia in China. The purpose of this scope review is to review the recent evidence from clinical trials regarding the benefits of traditional oral Chinese medicines and to outline their effects on vascular dementia. Seventeen Chinese herbal medicines used in vascular dementia were systematically searched from 7 databases, such as EMBASE, Cochrane, PubMed, China Sci-Tech journal database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Chinese Biomedical Database as well as Wanfang database. Data were obtained from guidelines, consensus, meta-analyses and systematic reviews and randomized controlled trials. A revised Cochrane Risk Assessment Instrument was applied to evaluate the risk of bias with respect to the intention-to-treat effect on eligible randomized controlled trials. Microsoft Excel 2019, GraphPad Prism and RSTUDIO statistics were employed for data integration and process. As the data show, the number of research published increased between 2009 and 2014, while the most studied medicines were TianZhi, Ginkgo biloba leaf and NaoXinTong. A low overall bias risk of intention-to-treat was achieved in only 7 trials. More consistent benefits were observed with Ginkgo biloba leaf and TianZhi for amelioration of mini-mental state examination score deficits and activities of daily living impairments. The overall reporting quality of randomized controlled trials of traditional oral Chinese medicines for vascular dementia was poor and the transparency of these randomized controlled trials must be urgently improved. Oral Chinese drugs may be beneficial to patients with vascular dementia, but they need to be further assessed.