Cochrane Db Syst Rev
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Cochrane Db Syst Rev · Feb 2012
ReviewWITHDRAWN: Smoking cessation for the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease.
Although the importance of smoking as a risk factor for coronary heart disease is beyond doubt, the speed and magnitude of risk reduction when a smoker with coronary heart disease quits are still subjects of debate. ⋯ Quitting smoking is associated with a substantial reduction in risk of all-cause mortality among patients with CHD. The pooled crude RR was 0.64 (95% CI 0.58 to 0.71). This 36% risk reduction appears substantial compared with other secondary preventive therapies such as cholesterol lowering which have received greater attention in recent years. The risk reduction associated with quitting smoking seems consistent regardless of differences between the studies in terms of index cardiac events, age, sex, country, and time period. However, relatively few studies have included large numbers of older people, women, or people of non-European descent, and most were carried out in Western countries.
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Acute bronchitis is one of the most common diagnoses made by primary care physicians. It is traditionally treated with antibiotics (although the evidence for their effectiveness is weak, and modest at best) and other even less effective treatments. Chinese medicinal herbs have also been used as a treatment. ⋯ There is insufficient quality data to recommend the routine use of Chinese herbs for acute bronchitis. Trial design limitations of the individual studies meant that we could not draw any conclusions about the benefits of Chinese herbs for acute bronchitis. In addition, the safety of Chinese herbs is unknown due to the lack of toxicological evidence for these herbs, although adverse events were reported in some case reports.