Acupuncture Combined with Chinese Herbal Medicine for Insomnia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Background: Insomnia affects more than a tenth of the world’s population. Acupuncture combined with Chinese herbal medicine (CHM), which is used for the treatment of insomnia, has been clinically demonstrated to be effective. However, Evidence-based medicine is still lacking. A systematic review of the treatment of insomnia was conducted to obtain a consistent evaluation of clinical efficacy between acupuncture & CHM and West Medicine (WM). Methods: Articles about insomnia published before Oct 1, 2022, were searched in English databases Pubmed, EMbase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, CNKI, CQVIP, and Wanfang. Two researchers assessed the quality of the studies that were included in the review. Review manager 5.3 was used to conduct a meta-analysis on the efficacy of the included studies. Results: Data on 734 (372/362) patients from 7 studies were included in the meta-analysis. It was shown that treatment of insomnia with acupuncture & CHM had higher effective rate [RR=1.22, 95%CI (1.07, 1.38), P=0.0003], comparing with WM. Conclusion: This study extended complementary alternative therapies for insomnia by providing evidence of the efficacy of acupuncture & CHM in the treatment of insomnia.