14 DAPT Debate Strategies

Furthermore, electronic literature searches for RCTs to June 2007 and September 2008, they might have left out some important studies, and new high-quality RCTs have been recently published. Therefore, we decided to assess the current clinical evidence of acupuncture for hypertension. Based on the paper and meta-analyses of the outcome on either SBP or DBP, acupuncture may selleck products have positive effects for lowing BP. Five subgroups were analyzed based on methodological variables of acupuncture arms and control arms. The BP-lowering effect of acupuncture plus western medicine was significantly higher than that of western medicine (SBP: ??10.20, ??14.00 to ??6.40, P?BML-190 P?Doxorubicin potential publication bias and low-quality trials, available data are not adequate to draw a definite conclusion of acupuncture for essential hypertension. And the positive findings should be interpreted conservatively. Before recommending the conclusion of this review to clinical practice, we have to consider the following weaknesses in this review. Firstly, in accordance with previous studies [73], the quality of the included RCTs was generally low. The 35 trials included in this paper had risk of bias in terms of design, reporting, methodology. Only 8 RCTs stated randomization procedure, for the rest 27 trials, they just mentioned that ��the patients were randomized into two groups�� with no further information. Allocation concealment was only mentioned in 4 RCTs [57], [60], [62]?and?[63]. A number of trials [32], [33], [35], [36], [37], [48], [49]?and?[54] only have one author, which is impossible for an RCT to be done properly in terms of randomization procedure and the allocation concealment. Therefore, we could suspect the truth of some of these claimed RCTs. In addition, all the trials did not describe the blinding in details. It directly led to performance bias and detection bias due to patients and researchers being aware of the therapeutic interventions for the subjective outcome measures.