Clinical efficacy of integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine in patients with coronary artery disease

Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Although guideline-directed Western medical therapy improves cardiovascular outcomes, residual symptoms remain common. Integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine is frequently used as an adjunctive strategy in China, but its real-world, short-term clinical associations require further characterization. This retrospective observational study included 215 patients with CAD treated between January 2022 and December 2024, including 106 patients receiving conventional Western medical therapy alone and 109 receiving adjunctive traditional Chinese medicine based on syndrome differentiation. Symptom status, laboratory parameters, overall clinical response, and documented adverse events were compared between groups. Because treatment allocation was nonrandom and the analyses were unadjusted for potential confounders, all between-group findings were interpreted as associations. No statistically significant differences were observed in the measured baseline demographic, clinical, or laboratory characteristics between the 2 groups. After treatment, the integrated-treatment group had lower rates of residual chest pain, chest tightness, and fatigue and greater changes in total cholesterol, triglycerides, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, fibrinogen, and D-dimer. The observed overall clinical response rate was higher in the integrated-treatment group (90.8% vs 76.4%, P  = .004). Documented adverse-event incidence did not differ significantly between groups. In this retrospective real-world cohort, adjunctive traditional Chinese medicine was associated with greater short-term improvement in selected symptoms and laboratory parameters and a higher observed clinical response rate, without a detectable increase in documented short-term adverse events. These unadjusted observational findings are exploratory, do not establish causal superiority or improved cardiovascular prognosis, and are insufficient by themselves to modify current guideline-directed CAD practice.