Meta analysis of randomized controlled clinical studies of acupuncture therapy for rheumatoid arthritis

Objective: Systematic evaluation of the effectiveness and safety of acupuncture for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Methods Computer Retrieval of Chinese Journal Full Text Database (CNKI), Chinese Science and Technology Journal Database (VIP), Chinese Academic Journal Database (Wanfang Data), Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), Embase, PubMed Database, Clinical Randomized Controls for Selecting Acupuncture Therapy and Conventional Drug Therapy for Meta analysis. The results were included in 24 literature, totaling 2006 patients. Meta analysis showed that acupuncture treatment has a statistically significant difference in comparison with conventional drug treatment [OR= 2.73,95% CI (2.18,3.41), Z8.78, P0.00001]. Subgroup analysis shows that acupuncture and drug therapies are statistically significant in reducing rheumatoid factor (RF) levels [MD− -2.92,95% CI (-5.60, -0.25), P≈ 0.05]; acupuncture and drug therapy in reducing erythrocyte settlement (ESR) levels, the difference is statistically significant. Meaning [MD=-2.99,95% CI (- 4.78, -1.21), P0.05]; acupuncture and drug therapy are statistically significant in reducing C-reactive protein (CRP) levels [MD=-1.44,95% CI (-2.44, -0.44), P0.05]. Conclusion Acupuncture treatment RA is significantly better than conventional drug therapies in terms of total effectiveness and reduction of RF, ESR, CRP levels, but still needs to be verified by large sample, multi-center, high-quality clinical randomized controlled trials.