Traditional Chinese medicine on treating epididymitis from buzai232's blog

Traditional Chinese medicine on treating epididymitis

Epididymitis is a common disease in nonspecific infections of the male reproductive system according to the clinical incidence of acute epididymitis and chronic epididymitis. Many clinical trials have proven that Chinese medicine has a significant effect in the treatment of epididymitis. In this systematic review, we aim to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for epididymitis.To get more news about Epididymitis natural treatment, you can visit our official website.

We will search for PubMed, Cochrane Library, AMED, Embase, WorldSciNet, Nature, Science online, China Journal Full-text Database (CNKI), China Biomedical Literature CD-ROM Database (CBM), and related randomized controlled trials included in the China Resources Database. The time is limited from the construction of the library to November 2018. We will use the criteria provided by Cochrane 5.1.0 for quality assessment and risk assessment of the included studies, and use the Revman 5.3 and Stata13.0 software for meta-analysis of the effectiveness, recurrence rate, and symptom scores of epididymitis.

This systematic review will evaluate the efficacy and safety of TCM for treating epididymitis. Because all of the data used in this systematic review and meta-analysis has been published, this review does not require ethical approval. Furthermore, all data will be analyzed anonymously during the review process.

Epididymitis, which is a common disease in nonspecific infections of the male reproductive system, is found in male of all ages, but most of them are young adults aged 20 to 40 years, which accounting for 70% of all the patients who suffer from it.It is, according to the clinical incidents, classified into 2 types such as acute epididymitis and chronic epididymitis, and the chronic type is more common. The main clinical manifestations contain referred pain in hypogastrium and groin, enlarged scrotum, increased pain when standing or walking.During acute phase, the clinical features such as local redness and pain, sudden rise in temperature, and leukocytosis will be manifested. Besides, nodules or lumps or turning hard could be detected through physical examination, accompanied with mild or moderate tenderness, and the vasodilatation of vas deferens could also be detected on the pathologic side.The cause of epididymitis is complicated and varied, but the pathogenesis of the disease is usually identified as secondary to prostatitis or urinary tract infections. The disease has been seriously affecting patients’ mental health and quality of life.[5] Meanwhile, it could also reduce the production and development of sperm because of the various degree of the inflammation in the epididymis, which resulting in a significant increase in sperm deformity; therefore, the risk of suffering from infertility is increased.

Currently, definite therapy for epididymitis has not been settled, and the use of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs are still the mainly treatment.[9] But for the recurrent chronic epididymitis, the drugs could not be easily effective because of the susceptibility of nodules.Besides, the chronic type could suffer from varicocele easily and the local congestion would be formed naturally, which lessens the local immunity and leads to the lingering disease more easily.Aiming at this situation, a few patients accept the therapy of epididymectomy which, however, does not enhance the overall efficacy because of the deficiency of the quality of sexual life.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been widely used in clinical trials in recent years. It has been undoubted that TCM has obvious curative effect in reducing chronic pain in the epididymis, reducing scrotal swelling and anti-tissue fibrosis, which have been shown by recent studies.[16] The studies also have shown that a specific ingredient in Chinese herbal medicine could achieve the desired results of peripheral analgesia, which mainly by the means of adjusting body function to accelerate the production of endogenous opioid peptides in the central nervous system and activate the analgesic system in the body of the patient.[17,18] Besides, it could also achieve anti-inflammatory effects by increasing the levels of β-Ep in inflammatory tissues and serum.[19,20] According to the theory of TCM, we believe that it could regulate the balance of qi and blood in human body, which ameliorates the function of the human body by stimulating the regulated acupoints. This kind of therapy has been increasingly popular among doctors and patients because of the unique advantages of simplicity, convenience, efficacy, and low cost.

In the preliminary searches of the electronic databases, we found that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of TCM for epididymitis are on the rise.[21,22] However, due to the limitation of the size and number of clinical centers, most clinical trials are small samples with low quality and lack of evidence-based exploration. Besides, the publication of the similar systematic review has not been retrieved in the database. Therefore, this review of epididymitis adopts meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy and safety of TCM in the treatment of epididymitis and provides evidence for its application in clinical practice.