Comparative efficacy and safety of acupuncture and Western medicine for poststroke thalamic pain

Jiju Yang, Xinyi Li, Chong Li, Ke He, Yang Wu, Haiming Lin, Xianfei Xie, Fan Zhang, Huifeng Hao, Guihua Tian*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Poststroke thalamic pain (PSTP) is one of the most common sequelae following stroke. Analgesics, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, and surgical treatment are conventional treatment methods of PSTP, but these methods have limited efficacy, cost more, and cause a likelihood of adverse reactions. Clinical studies have shown that acupuncture has a significant analgesic effect on PSTP without obvious side effects. But, there is a lack of high-quality evidence concerning its effectiveness and safety to support its use. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the clinical efficacy and safety of acupuncture versus Western medicine for the treatment of PSTP to provide evidence to support clinical PSTP treatment. Searches were conducted to identify randomized controlled trials investigating the use of acupuncture for PSTP across six databases, including PubMed, the Cochrane Library, EMBASE, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wan Fang Database, and the Chinese Scientific Journal Database VIP. RevMan 5.3 software was used for the meta-analysis. The results showed that compared with Western medicine, acupuncture had a higher total effective rate for the treatment of PSTP, reduced visual analog scale scores, increased beta-endorphin content, and decreased incidence of adverse reactions. However, the sample sizes of the included studies were insufficient, and the quality of the articles was relatively poor. In future studies, the clinical study design should be standardized and the sample size should be expanded to validate these results.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3050-3059
Number of pages10
JournalAnatomical Record
Volume306
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2023
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • acupuncturemeta-analysisstrokethalamic pain

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