Objective To systematically evaluate the effect and safety of systemic corticosteroids for acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Methods Databases including PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library (Issue 6, 2015), Wanfang Data, CBM, CNKI were searched to collect randomized controlled trails (RCTs) about systemic corticosteroids for acute exacerbation of COPD from inception to July 2015. The meta-analysis was conducted using RevMan 5.3 software. Results A total of 11 RCTs involving 1298 patients were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that a statistically significant increase in the treatment success rate when using systemic corticosteroids (RR=1.11, 95%CI 1.01-1.21,P=0.02), and a non-significant difference of effect in the subgroup of emergency department and ICU patients (RR=0.98, 95%CI 0.90-1.08,P=0.74;RR=1.19, 95%CI 0.84-1.69,P=0.34). Conclusions Current studies suggest that systemic corticosteroids is beneficial in terms of treatment success rate, but subgroup analysis shows that this benefit is controversial in emergency department and ICU. however, due to the limited quantity of the included studies, the above conclusions still need more high quality research to be verified.
