Research Article Chinese Herbal Medicine Combined with Conventional Therapy for Blood Pressure Variability in Hypertension Patients: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials Zhuo Chen, 1 Liqiong Wang, 2 Guoyan Yang, 2 Hao Xu, 3 and Jianping Liu 2 1 Graduate School, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing 100029, China 2 Centre for Evidence-Based Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing 100029, China 3 Cardiovascular Diseases Center, Xiyuan Hospital, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing 100091, China Correspondence should be addressed to Hao Xu; xuhaotcm@hotmail.com and Jianping Liu; jianping l@hotmail.com Received 21 August 2014; Revised 24 September 2014; Accepted 24 September 2014 Academic Editor: Myeong Soo Lee Copyright © 2015 Zhuo Chen et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Objective. Te aim of this systematic review is to evaluate efect of Chinese medicine combined with conventional therapy on blood pressure variability (BPV) in hypertension patients. Methods. All randomized clinical trials (RCTs) comparing Chinese medicine with no intervention or placebo on the basis of conventional therapy were included. Data extraction, analyses, and quality assessment were performed according to the Cochrane standards. Results. We included 13 RCTs and assessed risk of bias for all the trials. Chinese medicine has a signifcant efect in lowering blood pressure (BP), reducing BPV in the form of standard deviation (SD) or coefcient of variability (CV), improving nighttime BP decreased rate, and reversing abnormal rhythm of BP. Conclusions. Chinese medicine was safe and showed benefcial efects on BPV in hypertension patients. However, more rigorous trials with high quality are warranted to give high level of evidence before recommending Chinese medicine as an alternative or complementary medicine to improve BPV in hypertension patients. 1. Background It is estimated that there are nearly one billion people suf- fering from hypertension worldwide, and the number of patients will increase to 1.5 billion by 2050 [1]. Blood pressure variability (BPV) means the degree of blood pressure (BP) fuctuations in a certain period of time. BPV is regarded as a separate index which is diferent from the BP refecting cardiovascular activities. Many studies have confrmed that BPV could impact on hypertensive target organ damage and overall prognosis of patients [1–5]. An important factor to improve the prognosis of hypertensive patients is to reduce the BPV efectively. Clinicians pay close attention to lowering pressure steadily nowadays. Tere have been many studies that elucidated the relationship between western medicine and BPV. Although the results are inconclusive, most studies have shown that calcium channel blockers (CCB) are the most efective to reduce the BPV, especially amlodipine. Amlodi- pine in combination with other drugs may be more efective [6–8]. Short-term BPV within the 24-hour period is easier to obtain measured results. Ambulatory blood pressure mon- itoring (ABPM) is a way to assess the short-term BPV at present. By ABPM, a large amount of cross-sectional studies confrmed the increased BPV indicating the aggravated target organ damage [9]. A quantitative analysis of 155 Chinese people’s ABPM results showed that BPV of hypertensive patients was higher than that of healthy people [10]. Western medicine puts emphasis on quickly and efec- tively lowering BP and helps patients reach target BP as soon as possible. But even efective long-term control of BP by western medicine may not fully achieve goals of Hindawi Publishing Corporation Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Volume 2015, Article ID 582751, 16 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/582751