The efficacy of Qigong practice for cancer-related fatigue: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
Section snippets
The literature search
English language articles published before December 31, 2019, were located using Databases of PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library Database and Web of Science. The reference lists of articles and reviews were also manually searched. The search terms used were: “Qigong”, “qi gong”, “qi”, “chi kung”, “cancer”, “tumour”, “neoplasms”, “tumor”, “fatigue”, “tiredness”, “lassitude”, “random”, “randomized ", “randomized control”, and “randomized controlled trial".
Types of studies
Articles aiming to examine the effects of
Results of the literature search
Our database and manual searches identified 124 (Pubmed 13, Cochrane Library 14, Embase 38, Web of Science 57, manual search 2) potentially relevant articles, of which 26 articles were removed because of the duplicate articles. 98 articles were acquired after screening of title or abstract, of which 56 articles were excluded including 31 reviews, 4 reports, 3 conference abstracts, 18 obviously unmatched research content; 42 articles were further screened after reading the full text, of which 29
Discussion
The cumulative evidence summarized here indicates that Qigong has a moderate, statistically significant, favorable effect on fatigue symptoms. The magnitude of the overall mean effect (Hedges d = 0.46) provides quantitative support for the anti-fatigue effect of Qigong, which is comparable to the effects of other intervention therapies on cancer-related fatigue including Western Exercise of about one-third SD (Cramp & Byron, 2012; Puetz & Herring, 2012), psychostimulants (SMD = 0.28) (Minton,
Limitation
The primary weakness in this review was the small number of trials or effects. The relatively small number of the included studies necessarily limited confidence on the estimated effects for limited sample size. In addition, the participants in the included articles varied clinically in terms of type of cancer as well as the cancer stages. Hence, the results may not be generalized to all cancer patients. Further, although we divided the comparison controls into three groups (usual care or
Conclusion
The summarized evidence tentatively supports that the practice of Qigong is accompanied by small-to-moderately sized anti-fatigue effects for cancer patients or survivors. However, the results should be interpreted with caution because of the limited number of studies and their associated methodological weaknesses. Further studies of rigorously designed RCTs are needed minimize methodological bias and provide stronger tests of the efficacy and effectiveness of Qigong exposure on cancer-related
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. We declare that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the work submitted.
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