Explosion on the core outcome set (COS) in the clinical evaluation in the TCM clinical studies

Recently, more systemic reviews and randomized controlled trials were published to prove the effectiveness of TCM,and some of those were included by Cochrane Library. But due to the potential selective reporting bias and publication bias, few trials were included in the meta analysis, which failed to prove the evidence for the TCM treatment. The difference of reported outcomes comes to the big problem of the comparison between interventions. Such problem of difference was gradually brought to the attention. Therefore, Core Outcome Sets(COS), which stands for that the minimum standardized outcome set that must be repoted, may be the solusion to that problem. In this research we’ve introduced the formation and development of core outcome sets in TCM. Key words: Core outcome set; Outcome; Clinical trial; TCM-COS