Chinese Herbal Medicine for Treatment of Hiv/aids-associated Diarrhea: a Protocol of Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Clinical Trails

Background: Diarrhea is a common symptom of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) occurring either at the early stage of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or advanced stage, generally not fetal but seriously affect the quality of life.The treatment of HIV/AIDS-associated diarrhea based on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) syndrome differentiation or combined with conventional therapy has showed better effect, and improve the immune status of patients to a certain extent, which may have a good application prospect. This is a protocol for a systematicreview on health care intervention. The objective is toassess the beneficial effect and safety of Chinese herbal medicine for people with HIV/AIDS-associated diarrhea.Methods: We will search and include randomized controlled trials comparing Chinese herbal medicine with placebo or other active interventions, regardless of language and publication status. The primary outcome will be diarrhea frequency (per day or per week) and fecal character. Databases to be searched include The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) in the Cochrane Library; PubMed;China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI); Wanfang Data; Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (SinoMed) and China Science and Technology Journal database (VIP). For each step, two reviewers will independently perform the selection of studies, data extractionand assess their methodological quality by the Cochrane risk of bias tool. We will analyze data, and performmeta-analyses if data available.Discussion: By providing current evidence of the beneficial effect and safety of Chinese herbal medicine for people with HIV/AIDS-associated diarrhea,we intend toidentify potentialtherapeutic modality that may be of benefits so to inform practice.