Objectives: This study was conducted to help clinical studies for treating Functional Dyspepsia with acupuncture. We inspected tendency of studies of acupuncture treatment for functional dyspepsia and analyzed the assessing instrument for it by scrutinizing Pubmed recent publications.
Materials and Methods: We inspected 8 theses and scrutinized their objectives, periods, participants, materials and methods, the instrument of assessment for the studies, and criteria and symptom score for questionaire, results and JADAD score.
Results: 1. Most studies were published by oriental doctors except one which was published by an American doctor. More and more studies are being published in America and written in English recently. So it is considered that western doctors think that the acupuncture treatment is useful as unorthodox medicine for functional dyspepsia.
2. Among the 4 clinical studies, 2 studies were RCT and 1 study was not RCT and 1 study with vagueness. All 4 clinical studies were not double-blinded because they were about comparison between acupuncture treatment and medicine.
3. ST36, PC6, CV12, BL21 were chiefly used, and auricular point, ST40, SP6 were also used. Manual acupuncture were used in 2 studies, and low frequency pulse and electroacupuncture were used in other studies respectively.
4. 4 clinical studies used 0~3 points symptom score as the instrument of assessment. Additional assessments were on gastric emptying time, EGG and plasma level of motilin. All thesis were not verified of validity and reliability.
5. Among the 4 reviewed thesis, 2 theses were about acupuncture as one of the various treatment of functional dyspepsia, and the other 2 theses were about efficacy of acupuncture treatment. And the result generally showed effectivity of acupuncture treatment.
Conclusion: Acupuncture treatment for functional dyspepsia is considered useful as in unorthodox medicine by western doctors, and it is necessary to provide objective instrument for assessing acupuncture treatment for functional dyspepsia.