Effects of laser therapy versus laser acupuncture on rheumatoid arthritis elderly patients

Objective Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is regarded as the commonest and one of most known inflammatory arthritis. Our study was to determine the effects of laser therapy and laser acupuncture therapy on RA elderly patients. Subjects and Methods Forty patients with age of 65 to 75 years were being randomly allocated to 2 groups. Group(A) included twenty participants having RA treated via low level laser therapy. Group(B) included twenty participants having RA treated via laser acupuncture. All the patients underwent treatment by methotrexate. Treatments were provided three times each week to the two groups for twelve weeks.Independent laboratory technician and statistician were blinded to the study groups. Results There was significant reduction in scores of RAQoL questionnaire pre as well as post treatments for both the groups, with p<0.05. For HAQ questionnaire, significant difference was in the group treated with laser acupuncture. The IL-6 inflammatory marker had a significant reduction in pre as well as post treatments in only the group treated with laser acupuncture, with p < 0.05. In the MDA marker, it had a significant reduction in both groups for pre as well as post treatments. There was also a significant increase to the ATP antioxidant marker in pre as well as post treatments for both the groups, p<0.05. Conclusions This study suggested that the laser acupuncture can offer promising therapeutic benefits to assess in rheumatoid arthritis treatments; those therapeutic effects might be from inflammation reduction and oxidation stress alleviation, in addition to improvements in the antioxidants and energy status for RA patients.