An Overview of Systematic Reviews: Acupuncture in the Treatment of Essential Hypertension

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
Complimentary & 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
Number of systematic reviews included 11
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%).
Did the article find that the problem(s) led to qualitative changes in interpretation of the results? Not Applicable
Are the methods of the article described in enough detail to replicate the study? Yes