Acupuncture for Adults with Diarrhea-Predominant Irritable Bowel Syndrome or Functional Diarrhea: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Acupuncture for Adults with Diarrhea-Predominant Irritable Bowel Syndrome or Functional Diarrhea: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis: Objective. To evaluate the clinical effectiveness and safety of acupuncture therapy in the treatment of diarrhea-predominant irritable bowel syndrome (IBS-D) or functional diarrhea (FD) in adults. Method. Five electronic databases—PubMed, EMBASE, CNKI, VIP, and Wanfang—were searched, respectively, until June 8, 2020. The literature of clinical randomized controlled trials of acupuncture for the treatment of IBS-D or FD in adults were collected. Meta-analysis was conducted by Using Stata 16.0 software, the quality of the included studies was assessed by the RevMan ROB summary and graph, and the results were graded by GRADE. Result. Thirty-one studies with 3234 patients were included. Most of the studies were evaluated as low risk of bias related to selection bias, attrition bias, and reporting bias. Nevertheless, seven studies showed the high risk of bias due to incomplete outcome data. GRADE’s assessments were either moderate certainty or low certainty. Compared with loperamide, acupuncture showed more effectiveness in weekly defecation ( , 95% CI [-0.49, -0.08]), but no significant improvement in the result of the Bristol stool form ( , 95% CI [-0.68, 0.12]). In terms of the...