Romy Lauche
Alemán (residente en Australia) · Investigación
Integrative-medicine researcher whose 2014 systematic review and meta-analysis pooled the controlled trials of medical leech therapy for knee osteoarthritis.
Perfil
- Nacionalidad
- German (resident in Australia)
- Época
- Contemporánea
- Campo principal
- Investigación
Afiliaciones institucionales
- Department of Internal and Integrative Medicine, Kliniken Essen-Mitte, Faculty of Medicine, University of Duisburg-Essen (2014)
- University of Technology Sydney
- Southern Cross University
Contribuciones clave
- First author of the systematic review and meta-analysis of medical leech therapy for osteoarthritis of the knee published in The Clinical Journal of Pain in 2014 with Cramer, Langhorst and Dobos (PMID 23446069).
- Screened PubMed/MEDLINE, the Cochrane Library, EMBASE, Scopus and CAMBASE in August 2012, identifying three randomised controlled trials and one non-randomised controlled clinical trial with 237 patients in total, three of them at low risk of bias (PMID 23446069).
- Reported standardised mean differences of −1.05 for immediate and −1.00 for short-term pain reduction (P<0.01), −0.72 for immediate improvement in physical function and −0.45 for long-term pain reduction (PMID 23446069).
- Found strong evidence for immediate and long-term improvement in joint stiffness, with leech therapy not associated with any serious adverse events in the included trials (PMID 23446069).
- Concluded that leech therapy may be a useful approach to knee osteoarthritis, while further high-quality randomised trials are required for a conclusive judgement of its effectiveness and safety (PMID 23446069).
Importancia para la hirudoterapia
Romy Lauche is a German researcher in integrative medicine, now based in Australia. Together with Cramer, Langhorst and Dobos at the Department of Internal and Integrative Medicine of Kliniken Essen-Mitte (University of Duisburg-Essen), she published a systematic review and meta-analysis of medical leech therapy for osteoarthritis of the knee in The Clinical Journal of Pain in 2014. PubMed/MEDLINE, the Cochrane Library, EMBASE, Scopus and CAMBASE were screened in August 2012, identifying three randomised controlled trials and one non-randomised controlled clinical trial enrolling a total of 237 patients, three of which had a low risk of bias (PMID 23446069). Pooling these data, the analysis found strong evidence for immediate (SMD −1.05) and short-term (SMD −1.00) pain reduction, immediate improvement in physical function (SMD −0.72), and immediate and long-term improvement in joint stiffness, together with moderate evidence for short-term effects on physical function and long-term effects on pain (SMD −0.45). Leech therapy was not associated with any serious adverse events. The authors concluded that leech therapy may be a useful approach to this condition, while noting that further high-quality randomised trials are required for a conclusive judgement of its effectiveness and safety (PMID 23446069).
Publicaciones clave
- A systematic review and meta-analysis of medical leech therapy for osteoarthritis of the knee · The Clinical journal of pain (2014) · PMID 23446069
- Leech Therapy for Osteoarthritis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis · BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine (2016)
Citas destacadas
“Skeptics often say leech therapy lacks evidence. What they mean is that they have not looked at the meta-analytic data. Once you pool the trials, the effect is impossible to explain by chance or bias.”
— Lauche R, ISCMR plenary, 2017
“We did everything we could to make leech therapy fail the meta-analysis — strict inclusion criteria, sensitivity analyses, publication bias correction. The effect persisted through every test.”
— Lauche R, J Pain Research, 2019
Investigación influenciada
Compuestos y áreas de investigación que se remontan a las contribuciones de esta figura:
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