Progress of Research on the Prevention and Treatment of Chemotherapy-induced Peripheral Neurotoxicity by Traditional Chinese Medicine

Abstract

Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neurotoxicity (CIPN) is a common and serious complication after chemotherapy in patients with malignant tumours, characterized by high incidence, insidious onset, and a lack of effective treatments, which seriously affects the quality of patients’ survival. Modern medicine has limited preventive and therapeutic drugs for CIPN, and the clinical practice is based on dose adjustment and symptom management. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), CIPN is classified as “Bi syndrome” (Bi Zheng) and “blood Bi” (Xue Bi), and the core pathogenesis is “root deficiency and branch excess”, which is based on the deficiency of qi and blood stasis, cold and blood stasis and the deficiency of the liver and kidney. In this paper, we systematically review the research progress of Chinese medicine in the prevention and treatment of CIPN, including internal treatment external treatment, and the combined intervention of acupuncture and medicine. Existing studies have shown that TCM can improve clinical symptoms and reduce the incidence of neurotoxicity through multi-targeted and holistic regulation, with high safety and good patient compliance. However, there are still problems such as in-depth exploration of the mechanism and lack of high- quality evidence-based evidence in the current study. In the future, we should further elucidate the mechanism of CIPN, optimize the combination of Chinese and Western medicine, and conduct more real-world studies and randomized controlled trials to enhance the level of clinical evidence and guide the rational use of drugs.