A research team led by Chen Xin, director of the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences (ICMS), University of Macau (UM), has published an article titled ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Treatment of Patients Infected with 2019-New Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2): A Review and Perspective’, and the article has become the most cited SCI-indexed journal paper on the use of traditional Chinese medicine in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.
As of 20 March 2023, the article has been cited 486 times in the Web of Science database, ranking first among papers on similar topics. It has also been cited 573 times in the Scopus database and 914 times in Google Scholar. In addition, the article is one of the highly cited papers in Web of Science and is among the top 1 per cent in terms of citation frequency in the field of Biology & Biochemistry.
The research team published this article in March 2020 in the prestigious international academic journal International Journal of Biological Sciences. The co-first authors of the paper are Yang Yang, a master’s student in ICMS (now a PhD student), and Md Sahidul Islam.
In early 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic created a severe impact globally, with a large number of people infected with the virus developing acute respiratory distress syndrome. In China, more than 85 per cent of COVID-19 patients received traditional Chinese medicine treatment in addition to Western medicine treatment. The research team systematically and comprehensively collected, summarised, and analysed data on the use of traditional Chinese medicine in preventing and treating COVID-19 during the initial stage of the pandemic, which will serve as a reference for the use of traditional Chinese medicine in treating COVID-19 patients.
As the COVID-19 virus has similar epidemiological, genomic, and pathogenic mechanisms to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, the team also included the experience of using traditional Chinese medicine to prevent and treat the SARS virus in the paper in order to aid the treatment of COVID-19. In addition, based on published laboratory results of using traditional Chinese medicine in antiviral experiments, the paper discussed in-depth some components isolated from Chinese medicinal herbs that may come with potential therapeutic effects against COVID-19 and their mechanisms of action. In the paper, the team also calls for strict clinical trials and further experiments and research to study the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine with internationally-recognised scientific methodologies, which will help to promote the safe and effective use of traditional Chinese medicine in COVID-19 prevention and treatment.
| Source: Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences | |
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