Acupuncture for oculomotor nerve palsy:A systematic review and meta-analysis

To evaluate the safety and efficacy of acupuncture in the treatment of oculomotor nerve palsy (ONP).

The following database will be required from PubMed, Cochrane Library, Medline, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang data. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing acupuncture alone versus no treatment/another active therapy/sham acupuncture or comparing acupuncture with another active therapy versus the same active therapy were included. Meta-analysis was conducted according to the 2020 PRISMA guidelines. Data was analyzed using RevMan 5.4 software. Results were reported as risk ratios (RR) for dichotomous outcomes or mean differences (MD) for continuous outcomes, with 95 % confidence intervals (CI). The Cochrane risk of bias tool was used to access the methodological quality of the trails.

Eighteen RCTs with 1150 participants comparing acupuncture versus other therapies were included. The results showed a significant differences in the clinical efficiency rate (RR = 1.30, 95 %CI = 1.23-1.37, P < 0.001), scores of diplopia (MD = - 0.78, 95 %CI = - 1.39 to - 0.77, P < 0.001), palpebral fissure size (MD = 1.04, 95 %CI = 0.41-1.68, P = 0.001), the pupil diameter (MD = - 0.56, 95 %CI = - 0.70 to - 0.42, P < 0.001), quality of life (MD = 8.96, 95 %CI = 6.79-11.13, P < 0.001) between the experiment and control groups. However, there were no significant differences in the adverse effects (RR = 0.52, 95 %CI = 0.22-1.22, P = 0.13). The quality of the evidence test by GRADE was low or very low.

Most included studies suggested that acupuncture was more effective than the control group in the treatment of ONP. However, the quality evidence of most of the studies was low and most of them were performed in China.