Effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine External Therapy for Diabetic Constipation: A Meta-Analysis

Background: Diabetic constipation is a common complication of diabetes mellitus(DM), which not only leads to pains of patients such as abdominal pain and abdominal distention, but increases the economic burden of patients and society.Whether external therapy of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) an effective way to treat diabetic constipation has not yet come to a conclusion.Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of TCM external therapy for treating diabetic constipation.Methods: We searched 7 databases from inception to 21 December, 2021.The databases included PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), WanFang database, China Science and Technology Journal Database (VIP) and Chinese BioMedical Literature Database(CBM).All analyses were conducted by RevMan5.4 and Stata12.0.The Cochrane risk of bias assessment tool was used for quality assessment and risk of bias assessment.Results: A total of 40 RCTs were included in the meta-analysis, involving 3074 diabetic constipation patients.The results showed that TCM external therapy increased in total effective rate and weekly defecation times compared with control group.TCM external therapy also showed more reduction in defecation time, fecal traits score and FBS level than control group.Conclution: TCM external therapy effectively relieves the costive symptom of DM patients.This meta-analysis demonstrated that TCM external therapy was more effective in treating diabetic constipation patients than common therapy or routine defecation medicine.However, the quality of most included studies were low.More multicenter, randomized, double-blind, and placebo controlled clinical trials will be needed in the future.