Effectiveness and safety of electroacupuncture combined with conventional drugs in the treatment of stable angina pectoris in coronary artery disease: A systematic evaluation and meta-analysis

The objective of this study is to systematically evaluate the clinical effectiveness and safety of electroacupuncture combined with conventional drugs in the treatment of stable angina pectoris. METHODS: Computer searches of 3 Chinese literature databases (CNKI, VIP, WangFang) and 4 English literature databases (PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Web of Science), all searched from the time of database construction to October 2022. Two researchers were selected to independently perform literature screening, data extraction, and risk of bias evaluation, and meta-analysis of the included studies was performed using RevMan 5.3 software. RESULTS: A total of 7 publications with a total of 1042 patients were included, and electroacupuncture combined with conventional drug therapy compared with drug therapy alone was effective in improving clinical symptoms of angina pectoris (relative risk [RR] = 1.19, 95% CI = [1.09, 1.31], P = .0002), clinical treatment efficiency of electrocardiography (RR = 1.34, 95% CI = [1.19, 1.50], P = .00001), visual analog score (VAS) (mean deviation = 0.07, 95% CI = [−0.11, 0.25], P = .44), and Seattle Angina Scale (mean deviation = 4.91, 95% CI = [2.91, 6.91], P < .00001) were better than conventional drug therapy, while the number of adverse events in the intervention group was lower than that in the control group. One of the outcome indicators with greater heterogeneity was tested by sensitivity analysis, and each outcome indicator was found to be more robust. The risk of bias evaluation of each outcome indicator using funnel plots suggested the possibility of publication bias. CONCLUSION: The current study results found that electroacupuncture combined with conventional drugs can significantly improve the clinical symptoms of patients with stable angina pectoris compared with conventional drug therapy, with a low incidence of adverse reactions, but the number of high-quality literature with rigorous study design protocols is currently low, which may cause bias in the results of this study, so the above conclusions need to be further verified through clinical trials.