OBJECTIVEThe demographic characteristics of acupuncture outpatient in China is investigated so as to provide clinical evidence for the establishment of acupuncture indication.

METHODSClinical epidemiological table was adopted to do cluster multistage random sampling in 36 hospitals of 31 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) in 2008. The composition ratios of all indices were analyzed with SPSS 13.0 software. And trend analysis was carried out on the patient's demographic characteristics and the age distribution of clinical indications.

RESULTSIn the year 2008, 31 858 cases of out patients from 36 hospitals of 6 administrative regions were collected. There were totally 14 411 male patients (45.2%) and 17 447 (54.8%) female. The gender ratio of male and female was 82: 100. The average age of the patients was (50.6 +/- 17.7) years old. The number of patients over 45 years old was more obvious than groups of other ages (P<0.05). Age differences can be found in those 6 regions (P<0.05). Clinical symptoms varied according to different ages of the patients. Different characteristics of age distribution of acupuncture indications were held to exist (P=0.000).

CONCLUSIONAt the present, differences of gender, age and region can be found in out patients of acupuncture clinic. And the result shows that the number of female patients is more than male, with a large proportion of patients over 45 years old. Differences of age distribution characteristics of acupuncture indications still exist, which is considered to have the relation with the dominate indications of acupuncture and aging of the population.

Acupuncture Therapy ; utilization ; Adolescent ; Adult ; Aged ; Aged, 80 and over ; Child ; Child, Preschool ; China ; Demography ; Female ; Humans ; Infant ; Male ; Middle Aged ; Outpatients ; statistics & numerical data ; Young Adult

Animals ; Arrestins ; metabolism ; Hypoxia ; metabolism ; Male ; Prefrontal Cortex ; metabolism ; Rats ; Rats, Sprague-Dawley ; Receptors, G-Protein-Coupled ; metabolism ; beta-Arrestin 1 ; beta-Arrestins

Data studies are adopted to do systematic analysis on diseases described in theses on effect observation of acupuncture in Chinese Bio-Medical Literature and Retrieval System during 1978 to 2005. Numbers (frequency) of the disease mentioned are counted so as to analyze the acupuncture spectrum of ocular and adnexal diseases. The result indicates that the number of acupuncture spectrum of ocular and adnexal diseases is 31, which includes 22 diseases and 5 symptoms defined with western medicine as well as 4 syndromes of TCM. Thus, it can be concluded that ocular and adnexal disease is the one of the major component of acupuncture spectrums, and it is worth to popularize and apply that acupuncture for illness of this kind in clinic.
Acupuncture Therapy ; Adnexal Diseases ; therapy ; Eye Diseases ; therapy ; Female ; Humans ; Medicine, Chinese Traditional

OBJECTIVETo understand the survey of studies on acupuncture and moxibustion for treatment of sensorineural hearing loss at home.

METHODSBy searching China journal web, 60 correlative papers from Jan. 1994 to Aug. 2004 were found and analyzed.

RESULTSDescriptive studies accounted for 71.7% and trial studies accounted for 28.3%. The diseases studied were mainly sudden deafness and the treatment methods were principally auricular acupuncture and body acupuncture. Most papers did not have definite diagnosis standard, and most criteria of therapeutic effects were self-stipulated, with no detail processing methods for the results, and only one paper reported adverse reaction.

CONCLUSIONThe therapeutic effects of acupuncture and moxibustion on sensorineural hearing loss need to be confirmed with studies of higher quality.

Acupuncture ; Acupuncture Therapy ; Hearing Loss, Sensorineural ; Hearing Loss, Sudden ; Humans ; Moxibustion

Objective To investigate the application value of fetal umbilical cord blood hemoglobin analysis in the prenatal diag ‐nosis of thalassemia .Methods 113 couples were the carriers of the same gene type of thalassemia ,moreover the females were in the pregnant period of 24 - 30 pregnant weeks and performed the prenatal diagnosis .The fetal umbilical cord blood hemoglobin compo‐nents were analyzed by the full automatic capillary electrophoresis technique ,meanwhile the fetal thalassemia gene was detected .Re‐sults Among 113 fetuses ,the umbilical cord blood HbBart′s level in 11 cases of severe α thalassemia was 85 .0% - 95 .5% ,which in 9 cases of intermediate type α thalassemia was 22 .0% - 39 .5% ;the umbilical cord blood HbA level in 6 cases of severe β thalas‐semia was 0% - 0 .4% ,which in 17 cases of light type β thalassemia was 2 .1% - 12 .5% .Conclusion The fetal umbilical cord blood hemoglobin analysis could be used for rapid prenatal diagnosis of severe α ,β and intermediate type α thalassemia ,which can serve as a supplementary method for the prenatal diagnosis of thalassemia .

The teaching reform on functional experiment is an attractive problem of the medical teaching development at present. Our school has opened the course of functional experiment according to integrating and recombining with physiology, pathologic physiology and pharmacology, which brought into playing a positive role in enhancing the medical students' capability of practice, the comprehensive application of knowledge and the consciousness of innovation. However, some problems still exist and further practice is needed for more improvement.

Objective To explore the prediction efficiency of multilayer perception (MLP) model in prediction of diabetes mellitus (DM) complicated with coronary heart disease (CHD) by TCM personality and constitutions; To provide a new method for objective prediction. Methods This research utilized single factor logistic regression to filter out variables, which were significant factors of TCM personality and constitutions as analytic variables for MLP and multivariate logistic regression to establish TCM prediction model of personality and constitutions for DM complicated with CHD. The prediction efficiency of the above models were tested by receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC curve). Results The sensitivity, specificity and AUC of MLP were 0.915 (0.862, 0.968), 0.846 (0.793, 0.912) and 0.913 (0.806, 0.987) respectively, which was better than the logistic regression, while these indexes of logistic regression were 0.834 (0.695, 0.953), 0.762 (0.623, 0.901), and 0.869 (0.730, 0.941) respectively. Conclusion The MLP model is better than logistic regression model in prediction of DM complicated with CHD by TCM personality and constitutions.

OBJECTIVETo assess the methodology and report quality of systematic evaluation and Meta-analysis of acupuncture and moxibustion in China.

METHODSRetrieve CBM, CNKI, WF and VIP database, collect data from the information system established by Epidata 2.1, assess the methodology and report quality by using the QQAQ and QUOROM, calculate the percentage of adequate rate.

RESULTSThirty-eight reviews, including twenty six systematic evaluation and twelve Meta-analyses, met the enrolled criteria. Twenty-two kinds of diseases and six diseases systems were included. The methodology quality scores were generally low (3.34 +/- 1.44). The causes of the problems were insufficient literature resource, bias in data collections and inaccurate merging methods. The report quality was relatively low in abstracts, methods, trial flow, introduction and data merging.

CONCLUSIONThe amount of literatures on systematic evaluation and Meta-analysis of acupuncture is gradually increasing from 2002. However, the quality control is not ideal. It is important to improve the methodology and report quality.

Acupuncture Therapy ; methods ; China ; Moxibustion ; methods

OBJECTIVETo evaluate the clinical effect and safety of acupuncture and moxibustion treatment for allergic rhinitis and to analyze the present situation of clinical researches.

METHODSA search in PubMed, Cochrane Library, Chinese Biology Medicine (CBM) disk, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases was performed to gather the randomized controlled trials about acupuncture and moxibustion treatment for allergic rhinitis, identify additional clinical trials met the inclusion criteria and measure their qualities by using Cochrane Reviewers' Handbook 5.0. Statistical analysis was carried out by RevMan 4.2.8.

RESULTSA meta-analysis was performed on a total of 1076 patients involved in 12 papers which met the inclusion criteria. There were significant differences in both cure rate (Incorporate RR = 1.86, 95% CI 1.51, 2.29, Z = 5.82, P < 0.00001) and marked improvement rate (Incorporate RR = 1.58, 95% CI 1.32, 1.89, Z = 4.94, P < 0.00001) between acupuncture and moxibustion treatment and the routine medicine treatment for allergic rhinitis.

CONCLUSIONAcupuncture and moxibustion to treat allergic rhinitis is effective and safe and may have certain advantage over the routine medicine treatment. However, as for the low quality of partial inclusion literatures, no definite conclusion can be obtained as yet and it still waits for higher quality researches to further prove the dominance of acupuncture and moxibustion treatment for allergic rhinitis.

Acupuncture Therapy ; methods ; Humans ; Moxibustion ; methods ; Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic ; Rhinitis, Allergic, Perennial ; therapy ; Rhinitis, Allergic, Seasonal ; therapy ; Treatment Outcome

OBJECTIVETo evaluate the therapeutic effect of acupuncture for treatment of simple obesity, and to analyze the current situation of clinical studies.

METHODSRandomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving acupuncture treatment for simple obesity were searched from PubMed (1979-2008), OVID (1979-2008), EBSCO (1973-2008), Cochrane Library (Issue 2, 2008), CBM (1978-2008), CNKI (1979-2008), VIP (1989-2008) and WanFang Database (1998-2008). Literatures were enrolled focusing on RCTs related to acupuncture treatment for simple obesity; the quality of literatures were evaluated by two evaluators unaidedly. Meta-analyses were conducted with the Cochrane Collaboration's RevMan 4.2.8 software.

RESULTSEight papers including 1,017 cases, conformed with the enrolled criteria. Meta-analyses showed that there were significant difference between acupuncture groups and western medicine groups in the effective rate [combined RR (fixed effects model) = 1.11, 95% CI (1.05, 1.18), P=0.0006]. There was a significant difference between acupuncture and Sibutramine in the body mass [combined WMD (fixed effects model) = 1.94, 95%CI (1.73, 2.16), P<0.00001] and body mass index (BMI) [combined WMD (fixed effects model) = 0.52, 95% CI (0.33, 0.70), P<0.00001]. However, acupuncture was not superior to Sibutramine in hip circumference (HC) [combined WMD (fixed effects model) = -0.35, 95% CI (-0.56, -0.15), P<0.0007].

CONCLUSIONFor treating simple obesity, besides reasonable diet and exercise, acupuncture is safe and effective, which may be more effective than routine western medicine. The quantity of literature was limited and the quality of some literatures was low. Thus, more high-quality and large-scale of RCTs are needed.

Acupuncture Therapy ; Humans ; Obesity ; therapy ; Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic ; Treatment Outcome