This study was aimed to review of the selection and use of the therapeutic effect assessment indexes of randomized controlled trials ( RCTs ) on traditional Chinese medicine ( TCM ) syndrome differentiation and treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ( COPD ) based on clinical efficacy . Published studies were searched in the CBM , CNKI , VIP , Wanfang database , Cochrane Library , PubMed and Embase to identity all RCTS on TCM treatment of COPD . Two researchers selected studies and extracted data independently using a designed extraction form . The Cochrane collaboration software RevMan 5 . 1 was used for meta-analysis . The re-sults showed that a total of 40 RCTs were included . Meta-analyses showed that TCM syndrome differentiation and treatment of COPD can improve the pulmonary function and life quality , improve the clinical effect and TCM syndrome effect , reduce the number of acute exacerbation of COPD and improve clinical symptoms . Some therapeutic effect assessment indexes , such as pulmonary function , life quality , clinical comprehensive effect , the number of acute exacerbation of COPD, clinical symptoms and signs, syndrome effect and the integral of syndrome were used more frequent . Other indexes such as 6-min walk distance , BODE Index and health eco-nomic evaluation were used less frequently . It was concluded that TCM syndrome differentiation and treatment of COPD had certain therapeutic efficacy. A large number of strictly-designed, multicenter, high-quality RCTs are required because of the low quality of the included studies. The selection of therapeutic effect assessment indexes is still not standardized . The therapeutic effect assessment indexes should be selected based on differ-ent purposes of clinical studies with the clinical characteristics of TCM .