Acupuncture reduced the risk of stroke
Researchers from Taiwan conducted a large-scale study and showed that practicing acupuncture can reduce the risk of stroke associated with rheumatoid arthritis. The effect was independent of gender and age.
Rheumatoid arthritis is an inflammatory autoimmune disease of connective tissue with predominant damage to small joints. The disease reduces life expectancy by an average of 3-12 years. The risk of cardiovascular disease (including stroke) in people with rheumatoid arthritis is twice as high as in all others. The mechanism for the development of heart and vascular problems under the influence of arthritis is unknown, but it may be a matter of increased stress due to severe chronic pain.
Acupuncture is used to reduce pain and inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis. But researchers from the Chinese Medical University (Taiwan) decided to go further and test whether acupuncture can reduce the risk of ischemic stroke in rheumatoid arthritis. They presented the findings of their study in the journal BMJ Open.
The work is notable for its scale: the researchers examined national medical databases for 47,809 patients diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis between 1997 and 2010. The final analysis included the 23,226 people for whom the most complete data were available; 12,266 of them received acupuncture courses after diagnosis through the end of December 2010. The remainder did not use acupuncture to treat the disease. Both groups were dominated by women aged 40-59 and people diagnosed with high blood pressure.
The majority (87 percent) of patients in the first group received chiropractic acupuncture, three percent received electroacupuncture, and 10 percent received both types of treatment. On average, there were 1,065 days between the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and the start of the first course of acupuncture, and the total number of treatments was about 10.
The scientists found that 946 patients suffered ischemic stroke during the entire follow-up period. The risk of its development, as expected, was higher in the group of people with high blood pressure and increased as the person aged and developed comorbidities (such as diabetes). But even then, there were 43 percent fewer cases of ischemic stroke in the group receiving acupuncture treatment than among those who did not have acupuncture: 341 vs. 605 people, respectively. This effect was independent of age, gender, taking certain medications and the presence of comorbidities.
Despite such promising results, scientists urged to treat them with caution. The study is observational, the data for it was collected by simple observation, without active intervention, so it is impossible to draw unambiguous conclusions about cause and effect. Some other data were also missing: for example, the weight of the patients, their level of physical activity, and the results of laboratory tests.
In addition, the very mechanism of acupuncture's effect on the body is still unclear. Therefore, works showing the positive effects of acupuncture, consistently cause significant skepticism among many scientists.
However, the impressive sample, on the basis of which the new study was conducted, makes one wonder. Scientists have suggested that acupuncture somehow reduces the level of proteins responsible for inflammation in the body, thereby also lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease, including ischemic stroke.