A Systematic Review And Meta-analysis Of Acupuncture On Vascular Dementia (VD) Animal Models

Objective To systematically evaluate the effectiveness of acupuncture in Vascular dementia animal models and methodological the quality of publications.And to explore the potential mechanism of acupuncture in the treatment of vascular dementia.Methods Experimental animal studies of treating vascular dementia with acupuncture were gathered from Embase,PubMed,Ovid Medline(R),the Chinese biomedical literature database(CBM),China academic journal full-text database(CNKI),Chinese journal full-text database of science and technology(VIP),WanFang database(WangFang)and combined with manual retrieval related magazines from January 2012 to June 2017.We adopted the CAMARADES 10-item checklist to evaluate the quality of the included studies.The Morris water maze test was considered as an outcome measure.The software Stata12.0 was used for the meta-analysis.Heterogeneity was examined using I~2 statistics,and we conducted subgroup analyses to determine the causes of heterogeneity for escape latency and duration in original platform.Results Thirty-six studies met the inclusion criteria.The included studies scored between 3 and 8 points.The results of the meta-analysis showed a significant difference with acupuncture on reducing escape latency in 4-VO animal models compared with control groups(VD groups or placebo-acupuncture groups)[SMD-2.90,95%CI-3.74~-2.08;P<0.00001,heterogeneity I~2=31.8%]and three studies observed a remarkable effect of acupuncture for increasing the frequency of crossing the former platform[SMD 4.91,95%CI 3.82~6;P<0.00001,heterogeneity I~2=0%].Conclusion(1)Acupuncture may be effective in improving cognitive function in vascular dementia animal models,the unsatisfied quality and the true heterogeneity of the publications and the small sample size make it impossible for us to draw a more definite conclusion.(2)The quality of experimental animal studies of treating vascular dementia with acupuncture is not satisfied.Temperature control and use of target animal models(hypertensive,advanced age and diabetic)should be considered in future animal model studies,and animal experiments should be standardly and appropriately designed and transparently reported.(3)The mechanisms of acupuncture for vascular dementia are multiple such as anti-apoptosis,antioxidative stress reaction,amyloid?-protein inhibition and synaptic function ameliorating of hippocampal neurons.Therefore,this field should be further explored in future preclinical and clinical studies.