Research Division, Herscu Laboratory, Amherst, MA 01002, USA.
J Altern Complement Med. 2010 Mar;16(3):275-83. doi: 10.1089/acm.2009.0212.
The continuous threat of influenza pandemic, as well as the ongoing costs to human life and health care systems from yearly epidemics, create a continual need for progress in this area of public health. The diversity of available complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatment options are well known to the CAM profession, but poorly understood and accepted in mainstream medicine. This situation comes as no surprise given conventional medicine's reliance on repeated, large-scale randomized controlled trials of standardized design to support evidence-based clinical use of influenza antiviral drugs. The relatively low volume of well-conducted clinical trials on the treatment of influenza with CAM therapies compared to the high availability of conventional antiviral drug trials magnifies this problem.
The aim of this article is to provide structured guidelines for future CAM influenza studies based on a thorough review of consistent and standard design elements present in the controlled-trial design of conventional antiviral influenza therapies.
A selection of high-quality, influenza antiviral controlled trials from the published literature is reviewed, and important design elements are extracted and summarized to show both the consistency and the flexibility within study design elements.
The standardized elements from influenza antiviral trials can be considered and mirrored in future CAM studies. In this way, CAM therapies might be looked at on similar grounds as conventional medicines in terms of potential usefulness and benefit in the treatment of influenza.
流感大流行的持续威胁，以及每年流行疫情给人类生命和医疗保健系统带来的持续成本，使得公共卫生领域需要不断取得进展。可供选择的补充和替代医学（CAM）治疗方法的多样性为 CAM 专业人员所熟知，但在主流医学中理解和接受程度较差。鉴于传统医学依赖于重复的、大规模的、标准化设计的随机对照试验来支持流感抗病毒药物的循证临床应用，这种情况并不奇怪。与大量常规抗病毒药物试验相比，CAM 疗法治疗流感的临床试验数量相对较少，这加剧了这一问题。
本文旨在根据对传统抗病毒流感疗法的对照试验设计中存在的一致和标准设计要素的全面回顾，为未来的 CAM 流感研究提供结构化指南。
对已发表文献中高质量的流感抗病毒对照试验进行了回顾，并提取和总结了重要的设计要素，以展示研究设计要素中的一致性和灵活性。
可以考虑将流感抗病毒试验的标准化要素纳入未来的 CAM 研究中。通过这种方式，可以根据 CAM 疗法在治疗流感方面的潜在有效性和益处，将其与传统药物进行类似的评估。
