Currently submitted to: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Oct 13, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 15, 2025 - Dec 10, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint
Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).
Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.
Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).
Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.
Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.
Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Traditional Chinese medicine for adults with overweight and obesity: a protocol for an umbrella review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
ABSTRACT
Background:
Many of these systematic reviews have focused on a single modality of TCM for adults with overweight and obesity.
Objective:
To compare the efficacy of different traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) therapies for for adults with overweight and obesity and provide a higher level of evidence in the form of umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.
Methods:
Systematic reviews (SRs) and meta analyses (MAs) of TCM for adults with overweight and obesity will be identified and retrieved in databases of Wanfang, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Biological Medicine (CBM), PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Database of Systematic Review (CDSR) from their establishment to March 2025. The included SRs/MAs reported body mass index (BMI), body weight, waist circumference (WC), hip circumference (HC), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, total cholesterol, triglycerides, fasting plasma glucose, fasting insulin, homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance, and blood pressure will be extracted independently by two authors. In cases of disagreement, a consensus will be reached by consulting a third author. GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluations) analysis using the guideline development tool and AMSTAR-2 (A Measure Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews-2) will be used to evaluate the methodological quality of SRs and MAs, respectively. The meta-analysis will be conducted by R studio (metaumbrella packages) under the random-effects model, as well as assessment of heterogeneity, tests for small-study effects, tests for excess statistical significance, and Jackknife leave-one-out analysis. P value <0.05 will be considered statistically significant.
Results:
No Applicable
Conclusions:
No Applicable Clinical Trial: PROSPERO (CRD42024551788)
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.