Acupuncture has beneficial effects on effectiveness, cognitive ability, and activities of daily living in the treatment of dementia.
Thirteen SRs with meta-analyses met the inclusion criteria, including a total of 137 RCTs and 9012 participants. The results suggested that acupuncture has beneficial effects on effectiveness, cognitive ability, and activities of daily living in the treatment of dementia for 4–24 weeks, although there was a high degree of heterogeneity.
Subgroup analysis showed that acupuncture was more effective in treating vascular dementia than Alzheimer's disease. Further analyses also revealed that single acupuncture treatment was superior to combination treatments and that the safety of acupuncture was significantly higher than that of drug treatments.
The quality of reports was rated “high” in one SR, “moderate” in five SRs, and “low” in seven SRs. The methodological quality of only one SR was “low,” and the rest were rated "very low." The quality of evidence was rated “high” in one SR, including the effectiveness rate, MMSE, ADAS-cog, HDS, MoCA and FAQ.
