• Meixuan Li, Xin Xing, Liang Yao, Xiuxia Li, Wenbo He, Meng Wang, Huijuan Li, Xiaoqin Wang, Yangqin Xun, Peijing Yan, Zhenxing Lu, Biao Zhou, Xinmin Yang, and Kehu Yang.
• School of Public Health, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China; Evidence-Based Medicine Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China; Evidence Based Social Science Research Center, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China; Key Laboratory of Evidence Based Medicine and Knowledge Translation of Gansu Province, Lanzhou, 730000, China.
• Complement Ther Med. 2019 Apr 1; 43: 247-252.

PurposeTo evaluate the methodological quality and summarize evidence of important outcomes of systematic reviews (SRs)/Meta analyses (MAs) of acupuncture for anxiety.MethodsWe conducted a comprehensive literature search for SRs/MAs in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane library, Chinese Biomedical Databases (CBM), Wanfang database and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) until November 30, 2018. Three reviewers independently extracted data and assessed the methodological quality of the reviews according to the Assessing the Methodological Quality of Systematic Reviews 2 (AMSTAR-2), the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) was used to rate the quality of evidence. In the pre-experiment, we used the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) to assess reviewer agreement, the ICC value for overall score was 0.978.ResultsTen reviews were included. The assessment results of AMSTAR-2 showed that the methodological quality of all included studies was critically low. The lowest score were item "provide a list of excluded studies and justify the exclusions" and item "report sources of funding for the included studies", none of studies provided information about the above two items, followed by the "providing a priori design" item with only two (20%) studies conforming to this item. For GRADE, of the 7 outcomes, high quality evidence was provided in only 1 (14.3%), moderate in 2 (28.6.7%), and low in 4 (57.1%).ConclusionAlthough most of the included reviews indicated that acupuncture group was more effective than control group in the treatment of anxiety, more importantly, the methodological quality of the included reviews and the quality of evidence were low. More high-quality evidence is needed to determine whether acupuncture is more effective than other treatments.Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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