• Jingwen Shang, Jia Xu, Zilong Zhang, LinLing Tian, and Yongyang He.
• Chengdu Eighth People's Hospital (Geriatric Hospital of Chengdu Medical College), Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China.
• Medicine (Baltimore). 2021 Aug 13; 100 (32): e26859e26859.

BackgroundRheumatoid arthritis (RA) has seriously affected the quality of life of patients with its refractory, recurrent, and disabled characteristics, and has become a major public health problem. Previous studies have confirmed that acupuncture and moxibustion have a reliable effect on RA, but there are many forms of acupuncture and moxibustion, and the efficacy of each form is different. This study is to evaluate the clinical efficacy of different acupuncture-related therapies in the treatment of RA by means of network meta-analysis.MethodsAccording to the retrieval strategy, we retrieved the randomized controlled studies on acupuncture-related therapy for RA from China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, VIP, China Biomedicine, PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and The Cochrane Library databases from the establishment of the database to July 2021. We assessed the quality of the studies using the Cochrane Risk Bias Assessment Tool and assessed the strength of the evidence using the Grading of Recommendation Assessment, Development, and Evaluation methodology. All data analyses were performed by Revman5.3, Gemtc 0.14.3, and Stata 14.0.ResultsThis study is to evaluate the efficacy of different acupuncture-related therapies in the treatment of RA by evaluating the total effective rate, pain scores, joint function scores, quality of life scores, laboratory indicators, adverse reactions, etc.ConclusionThis study will provide a reliable evidence-based basis for the selection of the best acupuncture form for the treatment of RA.Ethics And DisseminationPrivate information from individuals will not be published. This systematic review also does not involve endangering participant rights. Ethical approval will not be required. The results may be published in a peer-reviewed journal or disseminated at relevant conferences.Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.

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