To evaluate the effectiveness and safety of acupuncture for the treatment of obesity by reviewing currently available randomised controlled trials. METHODS: This review followed the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. Fifteen English and three Chinese databases were searched from their respective inceptions until July 2014. Key words used in the search consisted of acupuncture, needles, obesity, overweight, randomised trial and their synonyms. The risk of bias of included studies was assessed. The differences in effect size between acupuncture and control (including sham, no treatment, western medicine and dietary therapy/exercise) groups were compared using Cochrane Collaboration's RevMan 5.3 software. CONCLUSION: Due to the poor quality of included studies the effectiveness of acupuncture cannot be concluded. Better-designed, large-scale, randomised, sham-controlled clinical trials with long-term follow-up are needed.
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