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Bronchial asthma is a chronic inflammatory airway condition requiring ongoing management. Yupingfeng Powder — a classical Chinese herbal formula combining Astragalus membranaceus, Atractylodes macrocephala, and Saposhnikovia divaricata — has long been used to support respiratory health, and recent clinical studies have explored its potential as an add-on to conventional biomedical therapy.
This systematic review and meta-analysis, registered with PROSPERO and conducted in accordance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses 2020 guidelines, searched seven major databases up to October 2025. Researchers identified 20 randomised controlled trials involving 1,896 adult participants, comparing Yupingfeng Powder combined with conventional biomedical therapy against conventional biomedical therapy alone.
The pooled analysis found that the Yupingfeng Powder plus conventional biomedical therapy group achieved a notably higher overall clinical response rate than conventional biomedical therapy alone, with an absolute risk reduction of 14.5 percentage points. Meaningful improvements were also seen across several lung function measures — including forced expiratory volume in one second, forced vital capacity, forced expiratory volume in one second/forced vital capacity ratio, and peak expiratory flow — as well as asthma control test scores. No significant difference was found in immune cell subset ratios. Safety data were sparse, but the two studies reporting adverse events noted only mild issues such as gastrointestinal discomfort, with no serious events recorded. Treatment duration and study publication year were identified as the main sources of variability between studies.
The authors acknowledge that the included studies were of moderate methodological quality and largely limited to Chinese populations, and they call for larger, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials to confirm these findings.
Conclusion: This meta-analysis suggests that adding Yupingfeng Powder to standard asthma treatment may improve lung function and symptom control in adults, though the evidence quality warrants cautious interpretation pending higher-quality trials.
Source: Zhang Q, Zhang N, Zheng Y and colleagues. Frontiers in pharmacology (2026). View on PubMed (PMID 42147341) · doi:10.13820/j.cnki.gdyx.20191243