Systematic Reviews
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Meta-Anal. Oct 26, 2015; 3(5): 206-214
Published online Oct 26, 2015. doi: 10.13105/wjma.v3.i5.206
Traditional Chinese manual acupuncture for management of obesity: A systematic review
Kang Xiao Li, Angela Weihong Yang, Charlie CL Xue, George Binh Lenon
Kang Xiao Li, Angela Weihong Yang, Charlie CL Xue, George Binh Lenon, Traditional and Complementary Medicine Research Program, Health Innovations Research Institute, School of Health Sciences, RMIT University, Bundoora, VIC 3083, Australia
Author contributions: Li KX and Yang AW made equal contribution; Li KX and Yang AW searched, entered and analysed the data and draft the manuscript; Xue CC and Lenon GB checked data and revised the manuscript; all authors approved the final manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflict-of- interests.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: George Binh Lenon, PhD, Traditional and Complementary Medicine Research Program, Health Innovations Research Institute, School of Health Sciences, RMIT University, Crn of Plenty Rd and Clement Drive, Bundoora, VIC 3083, Australia. george.lenon@rmit.edu.au
Telephone: +61-3-99256587 Fax: +61-3-99257178
Received: January 20, 2015
Peer-review started: January 30, 2015
First decision: March 6, 2015
Revised: June 5, 2015
Accepted: September 16, 2015
Article in press: September 18, 2015
Published online: October 26, 2015
Abstract

AIM: To evaluate the effectiveness and safety of acupuncture for the treatment of obesity by reviewing currently available randomised controlled trials.

METHODS: This review followed the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. Fifteen English and three Chinese databases were searched from their respective inceptions until July 2014. Key words used in the search consisted of acupuncture, needles, obesity, overweight, randomised trial and their synonyms. The risk of bias of included studies was assessed. The differences in effect size between acupuncture and control (including sham, no treatment, western medicine and dietary therapy/exercise) groups were compared using Cochrane Collaboration’s RevMan 5.3 software.

RESULTS: Two thousand six hundred and twenty-one records were identified; after full-text articles assessed for eligibility, 9 of them met inclusion criteria. Majority of included studies had unclear or high risk of bias across all domains. All included studies had high or unclear risk of bias in randomisation, blinding and outcome data. Meta-analysis showed that acupuncture was more effective for reducing body weight and body mass index than no treatment group. Manual acupuncture was also superior to dietary therapy alone for decreasing body weight. With dietary therapy as co-intervention, combined acupuncture group achieved lower body mass index than combined sham acupuncture group or dietary therapy alone group at the end of treatment period. No severe adverse events from acupuncture group were reported from all included studies.

CONCLUSION: Due to the poor quality of included studies the effectiveness of acupuncture cannot be concluded. Better-designed, large-scale, randomised, sham-controlled clinical trials with long-term follow-up are needed.

Keywords: Acupuncture, Obesity, Weight loss, Overweight, Body weight, Body mass index, Randomised clinical trial

Core tip: This systematic review identified the benefit of traditional Chinese manual acupuncture in the management of obesity. However, the effectiveness cannot be confirmed due to poorly-design randomised clinical trials.