Abstract
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is highly prevalent and a major burden on the healthcare system worldwide. It has a severe impact on patients due to poor health-related quality of life (HRQL), dyspnea, and exertional intolerance. Our previous meta-analysis revealed that body acupuncture therapy had adjuvant benefits of improving HRQL in COPD patients undergoing optimal medical treatment. Previous studies indicated that treatment with combinations of acupoints was more effective than single acupoint treatment. The association rule analysis has been widely used to explore relationships in acupoint combination. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the potential core acupoint combination in COPD treatment by mining the association rules from the retrieved randomized control trials (RCTs) of the previous meta-analyses. This study was conducted based on Apriori algorithm-based association rule analysis, which is a popular data mining method available in software R. We extracted acupoints as binary data from the 12 included RCTs for analysis. There were 27 acupoints extracted from 12 RCTs. The top 10 frequently selected acupoints were BL12, BL13, BL20, BL23, BL43, CV17, EXB1, LU5, LU7, and ST36. We investigated 2444 association rules, and the results showed that {ST36, BL12} ≥ {CV17}, {ST36, BL12} ≥ {EXB1}, {CV17, BL12} ≥ {ST36}, and {EXB1, BL12} ≥ {ST36} were the most associated rules in the retrieved RCTs. The acupoint combinations of ST36, BL12, and CV17 and ST36, BL12, and EXB1 could be considered as the core of acupoint combination for further acupuncture treatment of COPD.
Highlights
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is highly prevalent and a major burden on the healthcare system worldwide [1]
Medical efforts have successfully reduced the associated mortality rate in recent years, new problems have been encountered as the Disability-Adjusted of Life Years (DALYs) of COPD rose from level 6 to level 3 [2]
Distribution of the Acupoint. ere were 27 acupoints extracted from the 12 retrieved randomized control trials (RCTs) from the aforementioned meta-analysis. e distribution details of the acupoint frequency are shown in Figure 1. e top 10 frequently
Summary
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is highly prevalent and a major burden on the healthcare system worldwide [1]. Patients with COPD often suffer from poor health-related quality of life (HRQL), dyspnea, exercise intolerance, acute exacerbation, and high mortality rate [1]. Medical efforts have successfully reduced the associated mortality rate in recent years, new problems have been encountered as the Disability-Adjusted of Life Years (DALYs) of COPD rose from level 6 to level 3 [2]. Increased life expectancy is accompanied with poor HRQL among COPD patients who continue to suffer from symptoms such as dyspnea, chronic cough, and sputum production. Many patients persistently suffer from these symptoms despite optimal pharmacological and nonpharmacological management as per the guidelines of the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease. In addition to the prolonged suffering of the patients, the burden of this disease poses significant challenges to the healthcare system [1]. us, it is necessary to develop other alternative treatments for COPD
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