Could traditional Chinese medicine hold a key to treating life-threatening cardiac disease?

Name: Traditional Chinese medicine-infused food becomes new fad among young Chinese
Uploaded: 2023-10-27T12:00:09.000Z
Duration: 2 min 17 s
Description: Traditional Chinese medicine-infused food becomes new fad among young Chinese

In a clinical trial, patients with acute STEMI who took TCM compound Tongxinluo showed a lower risk of another heart attack

Further study is needed, experts say, to identify the specific active ingredient – which could help advance future treatments

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There have been promising results from a clinical trial of traditional Chinese medicine Tongxinluo in preventing serious heart attack. Photo: Shutterstock

Holly Chik

Published: 8:00pm, 27 Oct 2023Updated: 6:16pm, 28 Oct 2023

A clinical trial in China has found that a traditional Chinese medicine compound significantly reduced cardiac death among people with a serious type of heart attack.

Acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) is a life-threatening condition that carries high risks of in-hospital mortality and recurrent cardiovascular events, but there have been no major advances in therapeutics in more than a decade.

Now a team of scientists in China and the United States have carried out the first large clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy and safety of a potentially cardioprotective Chinese medicine compound as an adjunctive treatment for patients with acute STEMI.

“Oral administration of Tongxinluo for 12 months, compared with placebo, significantly reduced … major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events, with a significant reduction in cardiac death [within 30 days]. These benefits persisted within one year,” the team said.

The researchers, from the state key laboratories of cardiovascular disease and component-based Chinese medicine, hospitals in Beijing, Guangdong, Henan, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Shandong and Xinjiang, as well as the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre, published the clinical trial results in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

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Traditional Chinese medicine-infused food becomes new fad among young Chinese

Tongxinluo, a compound of powders and extracts from several plant and insect products, means “opening the network of the heart” in Chinese. The patent medicine is developed and produced by Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical.