Background: Platinum-based chemotherapy is one of the standard treatments for advanced nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Despite on an effective treatment for advanced NSCLC patients, its high toxicity and limited clinical effects have raised big concerns. Astragalus injection (AGI) has been commonly employed as an adjutant chemotherapy drug for NSCLC in China. This review was conducted to evaluate the beneficial of AGI in combination with platinum-based chemotherapy in advanced NSCLC.
Methods: We collected all studies about AGI plus platinum-based chemotherapy for advanced NSCLC in the PubMed, EMBASE, China National Knowledge Infrastructure Database, the Cochrane Library, Wanfang Database, China Biological Medicine Database, and Chinese Scientific Journal Database established on July 2018 without language restriction. Cochrane handbook was applied to assess the quality of included trials. Stata (version 12.0) and RevMan (version 5.3) were employed for data analysis. The quality of the evidence was assessed with the GRADE approach.
Results: Nineteen randomized controlled trials (RCTs) including 1635 patients were included to determine the effectiveness and safety of AGI combined with platinum-based chemotherapy in the treatment of NSCLC. The result of meta-analysis indicated that comparing with chemotherapy alone, AGI combined chemotherapy could significantly improve the objective response rate (relative risk [RR] = 1.19, 95% confidence interval [CI] [1.06, 1.33], P = .002), the Karnofsky performance status (RR = 2.28, 95% CI [1.63, 3.18], P < .00001), and 1-year survival rate (RR = 1.40, 95% CI [1.16, 1.70], P = .0005), meanwhile increase the percentages of CD3 (weighted mean differences [WMD] = 11.98, 95% CI [8.0, 15.96], P < .00001), CD4 (WMD = 2.98, 95% CI [0.45, 5.52], P = .02), CD4/CD8 (WMD = 0.33, 95% CI [0.20, 0.46], P < .00001), and NK cells (WMD = 9.5, 95% CI [7.25, 11.76], P < .00001), decrease the incidence of leukopenia (RR = 0.52, 95% CI [0.44, 0.61], P < .00001), platelet toxicity (RR = 0.62, 95% CI [0.50, 0.76], P < .00001), and vomiting (RR = 0.72, 95% CI [0.60, 0.87], P = .0006). Based on the system evaluation results, the GRADE system recommendation grading method was adopted to evaluate the evidence quality. The results showed that the level of evidence was low.
Conclusions: The AGI apparently has attenuation and synergistic efficacy to platinum-based chemotherapy patients. However, considering the limits of articles included in the present researches, the recommendation is likely to be weak. High-quality RCTs are urgently used to generate conclusive results.