[A meta-analysis on effectiveness of acupuncture and moxibustion for chronic pelvic inflammatory disease]

To evaluate the clinical effect of acupuncture and moxibustion therapies for chronic pelvic inflammatory disease (CPID) by Meta-analysis.

Randomized controlled trials of acupuncture and moxibustion in the treatment of CPID were searched from Databases of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Scientific and Technological Journals (VIP), WanFang, China Biomedicine (CBM) and PubMed up to 15 October, 2012. Two researchers independently selected the eligible literature according to the designed selection and exclusion criteria, extracted data and made an evaluation on the quality of the included studies by using the Jadad 5-point scale. The Meta-analysis was carried out using software Stata 11.0.

A total of 26 studies involving 2 280 patients were included. Results of Meta-analysis showed significant differences between acupuncture-moxibustion intervention group and control group in terms of total effective rate [OR = 5.63, 95% CI (4.24, 7.47), P < 0.0001], cure rate [OR = 3.18, 95% CI (2.59, 3.89), P < 0.0001], and recurrence rate [OR = 0.11, 95% CI (0.03, 0.47), P < 0.05].

Acupuncture-moxibustion is effective in the treatment of CPID. Due to the Jadad scores of these included studies are low, high quality studies are definitely needed to confirm the conclusion.