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.