P04.50. Acupuncture for lumbar spinal stenosis: a systematic review

Results Of 237 initially located articles, three RCTs conducted in China on 336 patients in total were included. Because of high or uncertain risk of bias (particularly in domains including allocation concealment, patient or assessor blinding and selective outcome reporting) data could not be combined in a meta-analysis. All three RCTs measured how many patients had improved. One compared deep needling at Jiaji (Ex-B2) to conventional acupuncture, showing greater benefit from deep needling after treatment (RR 1.09; 95% CI 1.01 to 1.17; p=0.023) and at threemonth follow-up (RR 1.14; 95% CI 1.02 to 1.27; p=0.016), respectively. The second, comparing electro-acupuncture in combination with bloodletting therapy to electro-acupuncture alone, presented more benefit from combined therapy at post-treatment (RR 1.27; 95% CI 1.01 to 1.61; p=0.045). The third compared manual acupuncture plus Chinese herbal medicine to acupuncture alone, demonstrating more favorable results for manual acupuncture plus herbal medicine (RR 1.19; 95% CI 1.02 to 1.39; p=0.025), along with better scores on overall clinical improvements (WMD 3.20; 95% CI 1.32 to 5.08, p=0.001) after treatment. None of these studies measured the patient’s quality of life or reported on adverse events.