A Bibliometric Study On The Treatment Of Pain-related Diseases With Eye Acupuncture

Purpose: Eye-acupuncture is a kind of fine-acupuncture therapy which has been devoted to treating diseases by needling or other stimulating methods around the orbital since 1970 and could be used in managing pain-related disorders.This bibliometric analysis aimed at revealing its publishing situation,applicable diseases/symptoms,acupoints,dominance,and limitations for pain relief by systematically collecting all clinical studies on eye-acupuncture for pain so to inform current clinical use.Method: Six databases including China Network Knowledge Infrastructure(CNKI),Chinese Scientific Journal Database(VIP),Wan Fang Database,Chinese Biomedical Literature Database(Sino-Med),PubMed and the Cochrane Library were searched from 1970 to July 2017.The extracted information included bibliometric data,participants,details of eye-acupuncture,control treatments,and outcomes.The clinical studies we looked for were randomized controlled trials(RCTs),clinical controlled trials(CCTs),case series,and case reports on eye-acupuncture for pain relief.The methodological quality of RCTs was assessed and meta-analysis was conducted,which were performed using RevMan 5.3 software.The overall quality of the evidence was evaluated using GRADEpro.Results: In total,we identified 109 clinical studies which revealed an increasing tendency in the number of published studies,including 41 RCTs(37.6%),4 CCTs(3.7%),34 case series(31.2%)and 30 case reports(27.5%).Almost all(108/109)studies were conducted in China and 108 studies were published in Chinese.The 109 studies included 6851 participants with 56 different pain-related diseases/symptoms.The top five reported conditions were headache(22,13.2%),acute lumbar sprain(14,8.4%),lumbar intervertebral disc protrusion(9,5.4%),dysmenorrhea(8,4.8%)and frozen shoulder(7,4.2%).Only 17 studies reported outcome of adverse events.Outcomes were measured by pain symptoms,recurrence,quality of life,and mental health.A systematic review included 22 RCTs achieved weak evidence which showed eye acupuncture had better effect on relieving pain of headache,shoulder-hand syndrome after stroke,acute gouty arthritis,thalamic pain syndrome and lumbar disc herniation,but similar incidences of adverse events to control groups.Conclusion: Eye-acupuncture has been used in managing 56 kinds of pain-related diseases/symptoms.Meta-analysis of RCTs showed that,eye acupuncture could decrease VAS scale.But due to the poor quality and the insufficient amount of included trials,no confirmed conclusion could be draw and more clinical trials are required to provide more evidence for its effectiveness and safety.