Efficacy of Auricular Therapy for Motor Impairment After Stroke: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

A high number of stroke patients cannot recover fully from motor impairment despite early rehabilitation. Auricular therapies, usually given by acupuncture doctors or nurses, have been widely used among these post-stroke patients. Potential benefits of auricular therapies were shown in recent clinical trials.

The purpose of this review was to systematically evaluate the clinical effects of auricular therapy in the treatment of post-stroke motor impairment.

PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Cochrane Library, Chinese Biological Medicine (CBM), Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Wanfang databases were searched from their inception to May 2023. Randomised controlled trials of auricular therapy for the treatment of post-stroke motor impairment met the screening criteria. The primary outcome was the Fugl-Meyer Assessment Scale (FMA). The secondary outcomes included the Fugl-Meyer Assessment Upper Extremity Scale (FMA-UE), Chinese Stroke Scale (CSS), clinical efficacy and the Barthel Index Scale (BI). Meta-analysis was carried out using RevMan software 5.3.

Twenty-eight RCTs with 1993 patients were included. The meta-analysis results suggested that compared with conventional treatment, auricular therapy combined with conventional treatment significantly improved the FMA score (MD: 15.07, 95% CI, 12.56 to 17.59), the FMA-UE score (MD: 6.49, 95% CI, 5.54 to 7.45), the clinical efficacy (RR: 1.20, 95% CI, 1.12 to 1.29) and the BI score (MD: 10.26, 95% CI, 9.11 to 11.40), while the combination treatment significantly decreased the CSS score (MD: -2.98, 95% CI, -4.38 to -1.59).

Auricular therapy, as an adjunctive treatment to the conventional treatment, improved post-stroke motor impairment and self-care ability. Early auricular therapy of the patients in the early disease stage may lead to better improvement. Further well-designed, large-size clinical studies are needed.

This study suggested that auricular therapy could be used as a complementary therapy with conventional treatment for improving motor impairment and self-care ability among post-stroke patients with motor impairment in hospitals, long-term care facilities and homes.