ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Med.
Sec. Rheumatology
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1563715
Electroacupuncture Superiority in Knee Osteoarthritis: A Meta-Analysis of Four Acupuncture Techniques
Provisionally accepted
- Yancheng Third People's Hospital, Yancheng, China
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Background: Knee osteoarthritis is the most prevalent chronic joint disease affecting persons >50 years, which significantly impairs the patients' lives. Although acupuncture can treat knee osteoarthritis; none of the studies have compared the effectiveness of four common acupuncture techniques (electroacupuncture, filiform acupuncture, warming acupuncture, and fire acupuncture) in knee osteoarthritis.The Web of Science, EMBASE, PubMed, Scopus, and CNKI databases were searched for the clinical randomized controlled trials of electroacupuncture, filiform acupuncture, warming acupuncture, and fire acupuncture in the treatment of knee osteoarthritis published before September 1, 2024. We collected 52 studies and used R software to analyze data.The results of meta-analysis showed that the efficacy rates for electroacupuncture, filiform acupuncture, warming acupuncture, and fire acupuncture were 91.5%, 83.4%, 84.9%, and 83.5%, respectively. The respective visual analog scale (VAS) scores were 2.1, 3.2, 2.9, and 4.1, respectively. Moreover, the patient's age and body mass index (BMI) can negatively affect the efficacy rate of acupuncture therapies, whereas age and BMI positively impacts the VAS scores.Conclusions: Thus, our study suggests that electroacupuncture has the best clinical efficacy for knee osteoarthritis; however, patients' age and BMI should be considered in future acupuncture therapies.
Keywords: Acupuncture, Electroacupuncture, knee osteoarthritis, Body Mass Index, Systematic review
Received: 13 Feb 2025; Accepted: 13 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chen, Xing, Wan, Guo and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wanlang Li, Yancheng Third People's Hospital, Yancheng, China
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