Abstract: Objective To systematically evaluate the effectiveness of Combining theatment with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Transcatheter Arterial Chemoembolization Therapy (TACE) for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and to provide a reasonable supplementary scheme for the clinical management of HCC.Methods The literature of randomized controlled clinical studies on the treatment of HCC documented in Chinese and English databases from 2010 to March 2020 were searched online. The literature were screened by the quality evaluation of Cochrane handbook, and a meta-analysis was performed on the included studies with Review Manager 5.3 software.Results A total of 1222 references were retrieved, and 27 were included, with a total sample size of 2171 cases. By Meta-analysis it was shown that: 1.TCM combined with TACE was superior to simple TACE in terms of short-term therapeutic effect, and the therapeutic principle of removing blood stasis with traditional Chinese medicine is the best treatment; 2.Although there is no significant difference in the half year survival of patients with primary liver cancer treated by TCM in combination with TACE, the one-year survival rate of the treatment by removing blood stasis herbs in combination with TACE is better than that of TACE alone, and the two-year survival rate of Fuzheng and removing blood stasis herbs is better than that of TACE, and the curative effect of removing blood stasis herbs is the best; 3.TCM combined with TACE was superior to simple TACE in terms of KPS score, and the differences were statistically significant.Conclusion The efficacy of combining traditional Chinese medicine with TACE for HCC treatment is better than simple TACE, and the therapeutic effect of TCM for removing blood stasis is the best. More multi-center randomized controlled trials with larger sample sizes and high quality are still warranted to verify this result.

Key words: Transcatheter arterial chemoembolization, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Hepatocellular carcinoma, Meta analysis