Masao Suzuki,corresponding author1,3 Shigeo Muro,2 Motonari Fukui,3 Naoto Ishizaki,4 Susumu Sato,5 Tetsuhiro Shiota,6 Kazuo Endo,7 Tomoko Suzuki,1
Tadamichi Mitsuma,1 Michiaki Mishima,8 and Toyohiro Hirai5


Abstract

Background
There are an increasing number of evidences that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a systemic illness and that bodyweight loss is its prominent
manifestation. We focused on the nutritional outcomes to find out the effectiveness of acupuncture on nutritional state of COPD patients and on their prognosis in our previous interventional study.

Methods
The present study is re-analysis of our previous interventional study, COPD Acupuncture Trial (CAT) published in 2012. Data from CAT was re-analyzed in terms of nutritional status, inflammatory biomarkers, and prognostic index. Nutritional states were evaluated by the measurements of body weight, body composition, and muscle strength, and the nutritional hematological examination results (retinolbinding protein (RBP), prealbumin (PA), transferrin (Tf), and hemoglobin (Hb) in serum), and inflammation biomarkers such as carboxyhemoglobin (COHb), High sensitivity C-reactive protein (Hs-CRP), Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha (TNF-α), Interleukin 6 (IL-6), and Serum Amyloid A (SAA) were measured. The BODE index
was measured in terms of prognosis. These measurements were compared between the real acupuncture group (RAG) and the placebo acupuncture group (PAG). All data are presented as mean (SD) or mean (95% CI). The difference between baseline and final volumes was compared using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Moreover, correlations between nutritional hematological examination scores and inflammation biomarker parameters were assessed using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient.

Results
After 12 weeks, the change in body weight was significantly greater in the RAG compared with the PAG (mean [SD] difference from baseline: 2.5 [0.4] in RAG vs − 0.5 [1.4] in PAG; mean difference between the groups: 3.00, 95% CI, 2.00 to 4.00 with ANCOVA). Patients in RAG also had improvements in the results of nutritional hematological examination (RBP, PA, Tf, Hb), Inflammation biomarkers (TNF-α, IL-6, SAA, Hs-CRP, COHb) and the BODE index.

Conclusion
This study demonstrated some clear evidences that acupuncture can be a useful adjunctive therapy to improve nutritional state of COPD patients.