| Ref ID | 918 |
| First Author | M. Zhou |
| Journal | INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GENERAL MEDICINE |
| Year Of Publishing | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.dovepress.com/an-overview-of-systematic-reviews-acupuncture-in-the-treatment-of-esse-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-IJGM |
| Keywords |
• Cardiology • Complementary & Alternative |
| Problem(s) |
• Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality • Funding or sponsor of systematic review not reported • Reasons for excluding potentially eligible studies not provided • Lack of prespecification in eligibility criteria • Insufficient literature searches • Single reviewer / lack of double checking • Lack of statistical expertise in handling of quantitative data • Poor consideration of publication bias • Meta-analyses and forest plots presented without considering risk of bias / quality |
| Article Type | Empirical |
| Article Subtype | Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review |
| First Author Country | China |
| Checklists |
• PRISMA 2020 • AMSTAR 2 |
| Aim | To provide an overview of the effectiveness and safety of acupuncture for essential hypertension and assesses the quality of reports, methodological bias, quality of evidence and risk of bias for inclusion in the evaluation. |
| Level of Investigation | Descriptive |
| Summary of Findings | From 11 included systematic reviews of acupuncture for essential hypertension indexed across Pubmed, Embase, The Cochrane library, WOS, CBM, CNKI, Wangfang Data, VIP and other Chinese and English databases from inception to 13th October 2022. The methodological quality (AMSTAR 2) was mostly very low. The AMSTAR-2 items that were least reported were: availability or deviation from a protocol; authors explaining their selection of the study designs for inclusion (0%), using a comprehensive search strategy (27%), performing study selection in duplicate (18%), authors providing a list of excluded studies and justify the exclusions (45%), using appropriate methods for statistical combination of results (45%), assessing the potential impact of Risk of Bias in individual studies on the results of the meta-analysis or other evidence synthesis (36%), carrying out an adequate investigation of publication bias (45%), and review authors reporting any potential sources of conflict of interest, including funding (9%). |
| Number of systematic reviews included | 11 |
| Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed | 218 |
| Treatment impacted | No |
| Treatment impacted description | |
| Interpretation impacted | Not Applicable |
| Interpretation impacted description |