A mini review of traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of depression in China.

To systematically evaluate the effectiveness of Chinese herbal medicine for treating depression in China, the electronic medical database from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) was searched using Chinese and the date is set, from 1st January 1994 to 1st August 2008. The 18 studies that met the entry criteria along with 1,260 randomized patients were included in this review. All studies with words like "randomization" or "quasi-randomization" in their abstracts were included, whether they used blinding or not. The results showed that the Chinese medicine treated group did not decrease the scores of the self-rating depression scale (-1.02, 95% CI -2.16 approximately 0.12, p = 0.08) and the scores of the Hamilton depression scale (-0.45, 95% CI -0.98 approximately 0.08, p = 0.10). The results showed there is no evidence to support that traditional Chinese medicine for depression has improved, which may be due to the low quality in all the trials. Therefore, more qualified, randomized controlled clinical trials are warranted to assure its efficacy.