Auricular acupuncture for chemically dependent pregnant women: a randomized controlled trial of the NADA protocol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The prevalence of maternal drug use during pregnancy in North America has been estimated to be as high as 6-10%. The consequences for the newborn include increased risk for perinatal mortality and ongoing physical, neurobehavioral, and psychosocial problems. Methadone is frequently used to wean women off street drugs but is implicated as a cause of adverse fetal/neonatal outcomes itself. The purpose of our study was to test the ability of maternal acupuncture treatment among mothers who use illicit drugs to reduce the frequency and severity of withdrawal symptoms among their newborns. METHODS: We randomly assigned chemically dependent pregnant women at BC Women's Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia to daily acupuncture treatments versus usual care. By necessity, neither our participants nor acupuncturists were blinded as to treatment allocation. Our primary outcome was days of neonatal morphine treatment for symptoms of neonatal withdrawal. Secondary neonatal outcomes included admission to a neonatal ICU and transfer to foster care. RESULTS: We randomized 50 women to acupuncture and 39 to standard care. When analyzed by randomized groups, we did not find benefit of acupuncture; the average length of treatment with morphine for newborns in the acupuncture group was 2.7 (6.3) compared to 2.8 (7.0) in the control group. Among newborns of women who were compliant with the acupuncture regime, we observed a reduction of 2.1 and 1.5 days in length of treatment for neonatal abstinence syndrome compared to the non-compliant and control groups, respectively. These differences were not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: Acupuncture may be a safe and feasible treatment to assist mothers to reduce their dosage of methadone. Our results should encourage ongoing studies to test the ability of acupuncture to mitigate the severity of neonatal abstinence syndrome among their newborns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".