Author(s)

Heng Wang ¹, Buqing Fu ¹, Menglan Li ¹, Jun Luo ¹, Wei Jiang ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Department of Laboratory, Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China

Corresponding Author

ABSTRACT

Objectives: Sepsis is a physiological, pathological, and biochemical syndrome caused by infection. The application of acupuncture as a complementary therapy for treating sepsis patients remains controversial. Our objective was to organize the relevant articles to assess the efficacy and safety of acupuncture as a complementary therapy for sepsis. Materials and methods: PubMed, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, EMBASE, CNKI, Wan Fang Data, VIP database and TCM Literature Analysis and Retrieval Database were searched for randomized studies that compared acupuncture as a complementary therapy with conventional treatment for sepsis patients. The odds ratios (ORs), with 95% CI, was calculated by using a corresponding effects model for continuous data, according to the value of I2. Meta-analysis was performed by RevMan 5.3 software. Results: A total of eleven articles were included in our study. On comparing the clinical indexes, the acupuncture as a complementary therapy group was found to be better than the conventional treatment group in 28-day mortality [OR=0.61, 95%CI (0.36,1.04), P=0.07], APACHE II score at 7th day [MD=−3.36, 95%CI (−4.30, −2.41), P<0.00001],concentrations of procalcitonin (PCT) [MD=−2.23, 95%CI (−3.33, −1.13), P<0.0001] and TNF-α [MD=-14.86, 95%CI (−23.74, −5.97), P=0.001] at 7th day.However, there was no significant difference between the two groups about the CD8+ T cells count [MD=0.36, 95%CI (−1.57,2.29), P=0.71]. Conclusion: Based on the current evidence, acupuncture as a complementary therapy treatment had better clinical safety features than the conventional treatment. For those indicators with a small amount of data, a greater number of randomized, high-quality controlled trials should be conducted in order to further verify the findings.

KEYWORDS

CITE THIS PAPER

Heng Wang, Buqing Fu, Menglan Li, Jun Luo, Wei Jiang, The Better Safety of Acupuncture as a Complementary Therapy for Sepsis. MEDS Chinese Medicine (2021) 3: 151-155. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/medcm.2021.030231

REFERENCES

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