Systematic Review And Meta - Analysis Of Randomized Controlled Trials Of Acupuncture In The Treatment Of Allergic Rhinitis

Objective:To evaluate the clinical curative effect and security of acupuncture treatment of allergic rhinitis by using systematic review in view of evidence-based medicine(EBM).Methods:Searching articles about acupuncture treatment of allergic rhinitis from the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure Database(CNKI),Chongqing VIP Chinese Science and Technology Periodical Database(VIP),Wangfang Data,PubMed and Cochrane Library with keywords"allergic rhinitis","acupuncture" and "randomized".The deadine was limited to November of 2015.Preliminary access to the literature that may meet the needs of the research. The literature was screened according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria established. Collecting randomized controlled trials with therapeutic measures of acupuncture and acupuncture combine with other adjuvant therapier while comparison intervention of positive medicine(sham acupuncture/blank control/placebo). Extracting and summarizing the basic characteristics and methodological features.Merging literatures of consistent methods features. Testing the clinical heterogeneity. Counting data are using relative risk calculation while continuous variables are calculated by mean difference. Setting 95% confidence intervals. Qualitative analysis was used to analyze the clinical heterogeneity while articles of high similarity were gathered and taken quantitative analysis with software RevMan5.2.Others were taken into qualitative analysis.In other condition,qualitative analrsis was taken into consideration.Results:30 articles containig 2602 patients were taken into analysis.3 groups of 13 articles using quantitative analysis while others using qualitative analysis.Analysis results showed that:camparing with positive medicine and sham acupuncture,acupuncture took more advantage in curative effect; camparing with positive medicine,acupuncture combine with electroacupuncture’efficacy was better; and acupuncture combine with other adjuvant therapier was more significant than comparison intervention. The difference was statistically significant.Most of the studies show that curative effect of treatment group was better than that of control group. A few studies show that the curative effect of treatment group and the control group is similar.Considering of the follow-up which were already reported, curative effect of treatment group was better than that of control group. In terms of adverse reactions, because the number of reports is not much, the adverse effects of acupuncture treatment can not be determined.However,limitationgs existed in the study due to language restrictions,low quality articles, publication bias,etc.Conclusion:Acupuncture or acupuncture combine with other adjuvant therapier have a good effect on patients of AR to some extent.Acupuncture or acupuncture combine with other adjuvant therapier may have long-term follow-up result on patients of AR.The safety of acupuncture cannot be evaluated definitely so far.