Zhang RQ, et al. - Here, researchers assess the clinical effectiveness of acupuncture treatment for simple obesity and aim to give evidence-based medical information to treating obesity with acupuncture. Based on these outcomes, acupuncture for simple obesity appeared to be an effective treatment. However, more studies on the safety of acupuncture used to treat simple obesity are required.

Methods

• For this research, they designed a comprehensive search.
• They searched on MEDLINE, EMBASE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials and Chinese databases (Wan Fang,CNKI and VIP) from 1 January 1915 through 30 November 2015 (MEDLINE search updated through 31 December 2015).
• To treat simple obesity, they included only randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that utilized acupuncture and sham acupuncture.
• In this study, the impact of acupuncture on simple obesity was measured utilizing body mass index (BMI), body fat mass (BFM), waist circumference (WC), hip circumference (HC), and body weight (BW).
• To assess methodological quality, they used Jadad scale.
• The random impacts model was utilized in the pooled investigation to adjust for the heterogeneity of the included studies, and funnel plots were utilized to inspect publication bias.
• The differences between treatment groups were reported as mean differences (MD).

Results

• After screening of all relevant literature from the electronic databases, they selected total eleven RCTs.
• In this study, there were 338 and 305 participants in the acupuncture and sham acupuncture groups, respectively.
• Auricular and electro acupuncture were both able to decrease BMI in obese patients (MD 0.47 kg/m², 95% CI 0.35 to 0.58, p<0.001; MD 0.50 kg/m², 95% CI 0.38 to 0.62, p<0.001).
• BFM change after acupuncture treatment compared with sham treatment was statistically significant (MD 0.66 kg, 95% CI 0.51 to 0.80, p<0.001).
• There were also significant differences in WC and HC between the acupuncture and sham acupuncture groups (MDwc2.02 cm, 95% CI 0.21 to 3.83, p=0.03; MDHC2.74 cm, 95% CI 1.21 to 4.27, p=0.0004).
• BW was not statistically significantly different between the acupuncture and sham acupuncture groups (MD 0.60 kg, 95% CI -0.20 to 1.39, p=0.14).
• Begg’s test and funnel plots demonstrated that the potential publication bias of the included studies was very slight (p>0.05).