Traditional Chinese Medicine Interventions in the Rehabilitation of Cognitive and Motor Function in Patients With Stroke: An Overview and Evidence Map

Choi TY, Jun JH, Lee HW, Yun JM, Joo MC, Lee MS · Frontiers in Neurology · 2022 May 17

DOI 10.3389/fneur.2022.885095

Objective

To provide a synopsis of the best clinical practices and interventions in stroke rehabilitative care and to identify areas with a paucity of evidence to guide future research.

Conclusions

Most systematic reviews (SRs) concluded that TCM interventions may have potential benefits in stroke rehabilitation. The results were more promising when acupuncture was used for shoulder–hand syndrome.

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Insights

Acupuncture shows potential benefits in stroke rehabilitation, particularly for shoulder-hand syndrome post-stroke.

Systematic review papers evaluating the effectiveness of any stroke rehabilitation intervention were identified by comprehensive searches across PubMed, EMBASE, CDSR, six Korean databases, and two Chinese databases, as performed up until October 2021. Specific quality assessment tools (AMSTAR 2) were employed to determine the fitness of systematic reviews for inclusion. Furthermore, graphic representations like bubble plots were utilized to effectively visualize and organize scientific evidence on different clinical topics, number of articles, patient inclusion, confidence, and demonstrated effectiveness of interventions. The research paper scrutinizes 48 carefully-selected systematic reviews, performed between 2015 and 2021. These reviews either concentrate on post-stroke cognitive impairment (four systematic reviews) or primarily address post-stroke motor function (forty-four systematic reviews). 19 different interventions from traditional Chinese medicine, with acupuncture being the most prevalent, are methodically inspected. The study notes that the quality of the selected systematic reviews was overall low or very low. Despite this, most reviews did indicate that traditional Chinese medicine interventions, such as acupuncture, appear to possess potential benefits for stroke rehabilitation, particularly with shoulder-hand syndrome.