The Efficacy Of Acupuncture For The Treatment Of Vascular Dementia: A Meta-analysis

Object: Recent studies have reported that acupuncture is effective as atreatment for vascular dementia. In order to understand the therapeutic effectof acupuncture on vascular dementia,so as to provide a new idea for thetreatment of vascular dementia,and subsequently to guide clinical practicein improving quality of life of these patients, and also to reduce the mentalstress and financial burden of the community in the treatment of vasculardementia.Method: According to evidence-based requires, the following Englishand Chinese electronic databases were searched from January2000toDecember2012: the CochraneLibrary，EMBASE， PUPMED，MEDINE,Wangfang，CNKI，Chinese Biomedical Literature database，VIP ChineseScience and Technology journals database etc. Vascular dementia,multi-infarct dementia，acupucture were used as the search terms. All articles were included that reported an RCT in which human patients withVD were treated with acupuncture compare to medicine. Then two reviewersindependently screened the original literatures and extracted data andassessed methodological quality. At last we used RevMan5.0software forMeta-analysis.Result: Four randomized controlled trials conformed to the criteriawere enrolled and all of them are of high quality. In the308casesenrolled,the number of acupuncture group is104.The number of medicinegroup is104. The total OR of the overall efficacy is2.62.And95%CI is1.39to4.97.The funnel plot is basically symmetrical.Thus the acupuncturegroup is considered to be better than oral medicine group on improving theoverall efficacy of vascular dementia. And the difference is statisticallysignificant (p=0.003)Conclusion: Acupunture is better than oral medicine on improving theoverall efficacy of patients with vascular dementia. But with most of theoriginal literatures included, neither confessed blinded nor confessedallocation concealment. The study design still needs improvement.Therefore,the efficacy of acupuncture treatment of vascular dementia needsmore high-quality and large-scaled randomized double-blind controlledtrials to strengthen the evidence.