Acupoint catgut embedding for the treatment of obesity in adults: A systematic review protocol

BACKGROUND: Obesity is the biggest chronic health problems among adults worldwide and the main predisposing factor in many types of systemic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and so on. In clinical reports on Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupoint catgut embedding has been shown to improve various clinical indicators for diseases including obesity and body mass index (BMI), but the safety of this and method has not been assessed. METHODS: This systematic review searched the following 8 databases between from January 2015 to December 2018: the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, PubMed, EMBASE, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, the Chinese Scientific Journal Database, the Wan-fang Database, the China Doctoral Dissertations Full-text Database and the China Master's Theses Full-text Database, and will manually searched the list of medical journals as a supplement. RCTs containing acupoint catgut embedding method for the treatment of obesity will be included. By reading the titles, abstracts and full texts, the 2 reviewers will independently complete the studies selection, data extraction, and quality assessment. The bias risk assessment, data synthesis, and subgroup analysis were performed using Revman 5.1 software. RESULTS: The primary outcome measures include weight, improvement rate, secondary outcome measures include BMI, waist circumference, hip circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, fat percentage, and so on. The safety assessment includes the incidence of adverse events. The results will be displayed as the risk ratio of the dichotomous data, the standardized mean difference or weighted mean difference for the continuous data. CONCLUSION: This systematic review will retrieve clinical randomized controlled trials (RCT) on acupoint catgut embedding for obesity in 8 databases, aiming to describe and update existing evidence on the efficacy and safety of acupoint catgut embedding for obesity in adults. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42018098793.