Materials and Methods:
We conducted a retrospective analysis of a large clinical database.
Clinical database: A large clinical case report database from a private homeopathic medical practice was used. The database consisted of over 11,000 case records. The hard copies of the case records were manually inspected for data, and the data were recorded in an Excel sheet. The available data included detailed patient information on demographics, presenting complaints, past medical history, family medical history, laboratory findings, imaging study reports, concurrent medications and homeopathic treatments with follow-ups. The patient information was completely anonymised for the sake of the study, and only the data required for the study were collected.
Eligibility criteria: Patients presenting with chronic inflammatory disease at consultation were included in the study.
Intervention/exposure: We did not consider the effect of any treatment or therapy.
Outcome/measure: The primary outcome of interest for the study was the co-existence of acute and chronic inflammatory states. We also considered different age groups and diagnoses that may have a bearing on the primary outcome.
Here, acute inflammatory conditions was defined as cases with an instance of high fever in the last year prior to the date of consultation.
Exclusion criteria: If the required data were unclear or missing, we excluded the patient and considered only the subjects who had complete data.
Data collected: Data regarding age, sex, current diagnosis, comorbidities, past history, and last high fever were collected.
Statistical analysis: Categorical data are presented as proportions and percentages.
We performed a chi-squared test to assess the association of acute and chronic inflammatory states. Since the sample population consisted of a wide variety of conditions and diverse age groups, we performed subgroup analysis to test the acute and chronic inflammation association in the different age groups by chi-squared test.
We performed a sensitivity analysis by analysing patients presenting with acute inflammatory conditions at consultation and testing the association of chronic disease in general and with respect to age. P< .05 was considered statistically significant for all the tests.
We further collected cases, from multiple homeopathic practices, of chronic conditions that were improving considerably under treatment and analysed the medical history for patterns of acute and chronic conditions.
Missing data: We did not include any case record where the information was incomplete or unclear. Therefore, no missing data management was carried out.