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Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is highly prevalent and a major burden on the healthcare system worldwide. It has a severe impact on patients due to poor health-related quality of life (HRQL), dyspnea, and exertional intolerance. Our previous meta-analysis revealed that body acupuncture therapy had adjuvant benefits of improving HRQL in COPD patients undergoing optimal medical treatment. Previous studies indicated that treatment with combinations of acupoints was more effective than single acupoint treatment. The association rule analysis has been widely used to explore relationships in acupoint combination. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the potential core acupoint combination in COPD treatment by mining the association rules from the retrieved randomized control trials (RCTs) of the previous meta-analyses. This study was conducted based on Apriori algorithm-based association rule analysis, which is a popular data mining method available in software R. We extracted acupoints as binary data from the 12 included RCTs for analysis. There were 27 acupoints extracted from 12 RCTs. The top 10 frequently selected acupoints were BL12, BL13, BL20, BL23, BL43, CV17, EXB1, LU5, LU7, and ST36. We investigated 2444 association rules, and the results showed that {ST36, BL12} ≥ {CV17}, {ST36, BL12} ≥ {EXB1}, {CV17, BL12} ≥ {ST36}, and {EXB1, BL12} ≥ {ST36} were the most associated rules in the retrieved RCTs. The acupoint combinations of ST36, BL12, and CV17 and ST36, BL12, and EXB1 could be considered as the core of acupoint combination for further acupuncture treatment of COPD.

BackgroundStroke leads to tremendous impacts on patients and the healthcare system. It is crucial to explore the potential management of rehabilitation. Acupuncture and traditional Chinese herbal medicine (TCHM) integrated with conventional rehabilitation benefit post-stroke functional recovery.MethodsWe retrospectively reviewed the medical records of all patients included in the Integrated Traditional Chinese-Western Medicine care program for stroke (ITCWM-stroke care program) in 2019 in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital to investigate the effects of acupuncture and TCHM integrated with conventional rehabilitation on National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) and Barthel Index (BI) scores before and after the program.ResultsA total of 255 stroke inpatients were retrieved and divided into acupuncture and acupuncture + TCHM group by hemorrhagic and ischemic stroke types, respectively. All the patients were recruited in the program at the early subacute phase after stroke onset. Of the hemorrhagic and ischemic stroke subjects, the NIHSS and BI total scores were significantly improved in the acupuncture and acupuncture + TCHM groups. The subgroup analysis results showed that in subjects with a baseline BI score ≤ 40, the acupuncture + TCHM group significantly improved BI total score better than the acupuncture group in both hemorrhagic (p < 0.05) and ischemic (p < 0.05) stroke subjects.ConclusionAcupuncture and TCHM integrated with conventional rehabilitation significantly improve stroke patients’ functional recovery at the early subacute phase. Acupuncture + TCHM contributes to better activities of daily living (ADL) improvements in stroke patients with a baseline BI score ≤ 40. We suggest integrating acupuncture and TCHM into the post-stroke rehabilitation strategy, especially for stroke patients with poor ADL function.