Acupuncture bests pharmacotherapy for relieving depression, anxiety in FGID patients

Acupuncture seems to be better than pharmacotherapy at relieving emotional symptoms in patients with functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs), reports a recent meta-analysis.

Twenty-four randomized controlled trials were eligible for quantitative analysis, yielding a total of 2,151 FGID patients. Anxiety or depression scale scores after acupuncture vs sham or pharmacotherapy were set as the primary outcome. Online databases of PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Wanfang, VIP, Chinese Biomedical, TCM Literature Analysis and Retrieval, and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure were accessed for the present study.

Pooled analysis revealed that acupuncture was not significantly better than sham acupuncture at relieving symptoms of anxiety (standardized mean difference [SMD], –0.35, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], –1.05 to 0.33) or depression (SMD, –0.32, 95 percent CI, –0.71 to 0.07).

On the other hand, acupuncture significantly outperformed pharmacotherapy, yielding significantly greater benefit in terms of anxiety (SMD, –0.64, 95 percent CI, –0.93 to –0.35) and depression (SMD, –0.46, 95 percent CI, –0.69 to –0.22) symptoms. Though overall quality of the evidence was low, sensitivity analyses suggested that these findings were robust.

Moreover, acupuncture continued to be better than pharmacotherapy even when grouping patients according to the different FGIDs.

However, due to the potential presence of publication bias, the researchers noted that further investigation was needed to determine whether such symptom relief was due to a placebo effect or not, or was caused by specific or nonspecific effects of acupuncture.