Effect of safflower yellow on early type II diabetic nephropathy: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is considered as one of the most popular microvascular complications of diabetes and the leading cause of death among diabetic patients. Currently, even though safflower yellow (SY) is widely adapted in the clinical treatment of DN, no meta-analysis can guarantee the safety of this treatment. This paper aims to evaluate the dominant method of SY on DN disease. The reliable source of information for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and clinical research is listed as follows: the Chinese Biomedical Literature database, Chongqing VIP, Embase, the Cochrane Library and the China Academic Journals Full-text Database (CNKI). The CNKI search included Chinese journal articles, the full-text of important conferences and dissertations up to March 30, 2017. We picked out some particularly influential outcome variables including urinary albumin excretion rate (UAER), fasting blood sugar (FBG), blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) in each extracted study. In total, 1289 participants were included in this meta-analysis. The efficacy of SY alone or combined with Western medicine in the treatment of DN was better with statistically significant factors (odds ratio [OR] = 3.6, 95% confidence interval [CI] [2.37, 5.47], p <0.00001). We found that SY lessened the UAER, heightened the proportion of blood sugar and beneficially improved other detective indicators related to DN. Therefore, SY used alone or in combination with Western medicine was significantly more efficacious with lower toxicity than Western medicine alone.