Acupuncture can be effective and safe for primary trigeminal neuralgia. Five acupuncture methods were superior to conventional medicine (carbamazepine) in pain reduction intensity and response rate.
A total of 58 RCTs with 4,126 participants were obtained. The meta-analysis indicated that five acupuncture methods were superior to conventional medicine (carbamazepine) in pain reduction intensity and response rate. Meanwhile, electronic acupuncture plus manual acupuncture was the most effective therapy since it reduced pain intensity in 11 methods and improved the response rate in 10 interventions. Moreover, six interventions had acceptable adverse events, and none of the included studies reported severe adverse events. However, most pieces of evidence were ranked as critically low.
These findings show that acupuncture methods can be effective and safe for PTN. Moreover, electronic acupuncture plus manual acupuncture may be the best acupuncture treatment for PTN and should be administered to PTN patients. However, additional well-designed and high-quality RCTs should be conducted to verify the above findings in the future.
