Moxibustion, a form of traditional Chinese medicine, appears to be an effective and safe treatment for knee osteoarthritis.
Systematic Review Knee Osteoarthritis Moxibustion
The researchers used a series of databases including Embase, PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and others to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of previous systematic reviews on the treatment of knee osteoarthritis with moxibustion. They employed the Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews 2 to assess the methodological quality, Preferred Reporting Item for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses for reporting quality, and ROBIS Tool to evaluate the risk of bias in the systematic reviews. They also assessed the strength of evidence with the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation tool and carried out a meta-analysis of the total effectiveness rate.
From this process, 10 systematic reviews were selected that had met their criteria. These reviews included the results of 57 randomized controlled trials involving a total of 5,149 participants. However, these reviews were found to have several critical deficiencies, scoring low on the quality scale used. Despite this, moxibustion, and its combination treatment, were shown to improve the total effectiveness rate in knee osteoarthritis. Eight of the reviews had reported adverse events but none were classified as serious in either the moxibustion group or control group.
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