[Evaluation on acupuncture treatment of primary insomnia]

Acupuncture treatment of insomnia has been reported for many years, but its validity remains controversial up to now. In the present review, the authors took "Acupuncture", "Insomnia" as the key words to do a literature search from databases in both Chinese and English via computer retrieval system and also conducted a hand-made retrieval from journals of Chinese medicine as Chinese Acu-moxibustion, and collections of theses of the related academic conferences. Then, they made a systemic evaluation on the original articles from methodology, diagnosis, criteria for the enlisted and excluded patients, intervention methods of acupuncture and control groups, standards for assessing the curative efficacy, follow-up visit, etc. Of the retrieved 80 clinical articles, 20 are RCT (randomized controlled trails) composed of 1907 cases, including 4 high-quality trails and 16 lower-quality trails. Regarding the assessment of the therapeutic effect, measuring scales are often adopted in overseas studies, while in domestic researches, self-drawn standards are frequently used. In conclusion, there have had no high-quality clinical trails about acupuncture treatment of primary insomnia in China at the present, and the related evaluating methods could not definitely confirm the efficacy of acupuncture in relieving insomnia. Therefore, a strict and scientific clinical trail scheme being in line with evidence-based medicine is urgently needed in the coming studies on acupuncture treatment of primary insomnia.