- This month's top 3 research areas are 6 papers on circulatory system, 6 articles on contact factors affecting health status and health care services, and 6 results on injuries, poisoning and other effects caused by external factors.
- Selected Paper in December：Incidence of nerve injury following acupuncture treatments in Taiwan.
Acupuncture is a commonly used traditional Chinese medicine (alternative therapy) among the Chinese population, particularly for pain relief and improvement of chronic symptoms. Because of its invasive nature, it may inadvertently lead to nerve damage. A team from the Institute of Traditional Medicine at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University College of Medicine retrospectively collected and analyzed data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database spanning from 2000 to 2018. From the database, 886,753 patients underwent acupuncture treatment a total of 14,507,847 times. The study identified 8,361 cases where patients experienced nerve damage after acupuncture, resulting in an incidence rate of approximately 5.76 cases per 10,000 procedures.
The results revealed that common comorbidities associated with neurological impairment, such as diabetes, hypothyroidism, cirrhosis, chronic kidney disease, herpes zoster, hepatitis virus infections, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, dementia, and cerebrovascular accidents, were correlated with an increased risk of nerve damage following acupuncture. The authors emphasized that, in addition to the impact of diseases, aging was also identified as a significant risk factor. Furthermore, owing to improvements in technical maturity, there has been a decreasing trend in the incidence rate from the past to the present.
Highlight of DEC(2023) ：This month's primary research focuses on the whether the use of sedative and sleeping drugs increases the risk of deep vein embolism in the legs, the effect of the time cancer patients attended hospice and palliative care on morphine, length of hospital stay and medical costs, and the incidence of nerve injury after acupuncture treatment in Taiwan.
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