The Short-Term Effects of Acupuncture on Patients with Diabetic Gastroparesis: A Randomised Crossover Study

Abstract

In patients with diabetic gastroparesis, 1 week of short-term manual acupuncture reduces gastric retention and improves gastroparesis symptoms.

Meta-analysis of acupuncture for relieving non-organic dyspeptic symptoms suggestive of diabetic gastroparesis

“…Of these, 64 articles were excluded because they did not meet our inclusion criteria or were not randomized and controlled trials, duplicates and other reasons. Finally, the remaining 14 RCTs [19-32] were considered eligible which reported randomly assignment of patients (n = 948) to acupuncture and control group (one sham-EA [24], six domperidone [20,21,23,28-30], two cisapride [22,25] and five mosapride [19,26,27,31,32]).…”

“…The median sample size of these trials was 62 patients, varying from 19 [24] to 120 [21]. Of 14 trials, six studies used acupuncture [20,22,25,26,28,29], five studies used EA [19,21,24,31,32], one study used warm acupuncture [30], one trial used acupuncture combined with acupoint application [23] and another study used acupuncture combined with chiropractic [27]. Studies in which the interventions were acupuncture combined with acupoint application and chiropractic were included because acupoint application and chiropractic were considered as assistant techniques to acupuncture and the reported effects of these studies were mainly from needle-penetrating acupuncture on acupoints.…”

“…Figure 2 showed the summary of risk of bias of the included trials for acupuncture response rate and symptom improvement. In general, random sequences in 8 studies [19,21,22,24,28,29,31,32] out of 14 trials were generated correctly with clear descriptions (low risk of bias), but no trial gave a description of concealed allocation in their studies (unclear risk of bias). One trial [24] reported blinding of participants with sham-EA.…”

“…Only one studies [26] reported drop-out, but intention to treat analysis (ITT) was not used in their data analysis. Six trials [19,22,28-31] excluded the cases who had incomplete data, bad compliance or drop-out. All trials reported baseline comparison of age, sex and duration of diabetes, but only seven studies [19,24,26-29,31] gave baseline comparison of severity of gastric dyspeptic symptoms which were assigned as low risk of bias.…”

“…Eight RCTs [20-22,26-30] involving 585 diabetic patients were identified to observe the response rate of acupuncture in improving dyspeptic symptoms. Scales were used in all studies to determine the score change of dyspeptic symptoms such as bloating, stomach fullness, nausea, vomiting, retching, and loss of appetite after acupuncture.…”