Meta-analysis of the clinical effect of Kanglaite injection-assisted gemcitabine plus cisplatin regimen on non-small cell lung cancer.

OBJECTIVE: To systematically evaluate the clinical effect of Kanglaite (KLT) injection-assisted gemcitabine plus cisplatin (GP) regimen on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

METHODS: The CNKI, WanFang, VIP, Chinese Biomedical Database, PubMed, Embase and Cochrane Library databases were searched to collect the randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which evaluated the clinical effect of KLT combined with GP chemotherapy on NSCLC, published as of February 15, 2023. These articles were screened, extracted and evaluated. Revman 5.3 and STATA 17 were used for analysis, where the odds ratio (OR) was used as the statistic for the binary variables, and the mean difference (MD) was used as the statistic for the continuous variables.

RESULTS: After selection, this meta-analysis included 27 RCTs and 2,579 patients. Comparing with GP chemotherapy, KLT combined with GP regimen enhanced the total response rate ( OR =1.76, 95% CI : 1.49-2.06, P <0.00001), improved the Karnofsky (KPS) score ( OR =2.03, 95% CI : 1.55-2.66, P <0.00001), decreased the adverse reactions, including gastrointestinal reactions ( OR =0.41, 95% CI : 0.33-0.51, P <0.00001), leucopenia ( OR =0.45, 95% CI : 0.35-0.58, P <0.00001), anemia ( OR =0.47, 95% CI : 0.32-0.67, P <0.0001) and liver function damage ( OR =0.52, 95% CI : 0.38-0.73, P <0.0001), as well as elevated immune level, including CD3+ ( MD =8.51, 95% CI : 7.63-9.39, P <0.00001), CD4+ ( MD =5.68, 95% CI : 5.08-6.27, P <0.00001) and CD4+ /CD8+ ( MD =0.41, 95% CI : 0.38-0.44, P <0.00001).

CONCLUSIONS: Current evidence shows that the combination regimen of KLT with GP has shown promising results in increasing the response rate, improving the KPS score, enhancing the immune level, and reducing the incidence of adverse reactions in NSCLC patients. However, this conclusion needs to be further verified due to limitations such as the limited number of articles included in this paper and the variability in research methodology and quality among the included studies.