Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine , 11/01/2016
Lu WW, et al.
The aim of this study is to evaluate the clinical efficacy and safety of acupuncture therapy in the treatment of acute gouty arthritis. In context of the findings,, the authors illustrate that acupuncture is an effective and safe therapy for patients with gouty arthritis. Despite, the potential beneficial effect of acupuncture might be overstated due to the methodological deficiency of included studies. High quality RCTs with larger scale are encouraged.
Methods
- They examined data from 28 RCTs involving 2237 patients with gouty arthritis.
- They searched PubMed, EMBASE, ISI Web of Science, CENTRAL, and CNKI from the inception date of each database up to October 2015.
- Two reviewers screened each article independently and were blinded to the findings of the other reviewer.
- Data was extracted according to the predetermined collection form. Meta–analysis was performed.
Results
- Correlated with conventional pharmacological treatments acupuncture was more effective in rendering patients free from symptoms after 24 hours, lowering serum urate, alleviating pain associated with gouty arthritis, and decreasing the ESR; regarding CRP, no statistically significant difference was found.
- In addition, the frequency of adverse events in acupuncture treatment was lower than that in control group.