Objective To review systematically the clinical effects of spastic paralysis after stroke treated with acupuncture at meridian sinew("Jingjin"

musculotendon).Methods"Meridian sinew""stroke"and"spasm"were taken as the key words to retrieve from the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastracture Database(CNKI)

Chongqing VIP Chinese Science and Technology Periodical Database(VIP)

Chinese Biomedical Library(CBM)

Wanfang Data

PubMed and the Cochrane Library.The Cochrane"risk of bias"tool was used to conduct the methodological quality evaluation to the literature.RevMan 5.3software was adopted for Meta-analysis.Results Totally

13papers were included

with 820patients involved.In reference to Cochrane Reviewers’Handbook 5.0.2

the randomized controlled trial(RCT)risk of bias was assessed and it was unclear for all of the 13papers.The results of Meta-analysis showed that the clinical effect was improved with acupuncture at meridian sinew as compared with normal acupuncture technique[(1)total effective rate:OR=3.86

95%CI(2.67

5.57)

Z=7.20

P<0.00001;(2)modified Ashworth spasm scale:OR=4.54

95%CI(2.91

7.10)

Z=6.64

P<0.00001;(3)evaluation of limb motor function with Fugl-Meyer score:MD=4.18

95%CI(-0.59

8.94)

Z=1.72

P=0.09>0.05].The publication bias of included papers was not obvious and therefore it could be neglected in the impact on the combined effect size.Conclusion Acupuncture at meridian sinew is effective in the treatment of spastic paralysis after stroke.The total clinical effect and the improvement in muscular tone with acupuncture at meridian sinew are better than those with normal acupuncture technique.The quality of the included literature is not high generally.Hence

it is necessary to have more clinical studies with high-quality and strict design.