Acupuncture for low back pain due to spondylolisthesis: study protocol for a randomized controlled pilot trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Spondylolisthesis is the major cause of refractory low back pain. There are many studies of the surgical treatment of spondylolisthesis, but few of conservative treatments. There is also no optimal conservative treatment protocol, however, low back pain caused by low-grade spondylolisthesis is controlled with non-surgical pain management. Acupuncture has become a useful method for treating low back pain, but there has not been any study of its efficacy in relation to spondylolisthesis. This study was designed to establish the feasibility of a randomized controlled trial and the safety of acupuncture for low back pain due to low-grade spondylolisthesis. METHODS/DESIGN: The study is a randomized controlled pilot clinical trial of five weeks duration. Fourteen patients will be recruited and randomly allocated to two groups: an acupuncture plus interlaminar epidural steroid injection group (experimental group), and an interlaminar epidural steroid injection group (control group). All patients will be administered an interlaminar epidural steroid injection once a week for three weeks (three injections in total), but only the experimental group will receive additional treatment with three acupuncture sessions a week for three weeks (nine acupuncture sessions in total). The primary outcome will be measured by the visual analogue scale (VAS). Our primary end point is three-week VAS. The secondary outcome will be measured using the PainVision system, the short-form McGill Pain Questionnaire, and the Oswestry Disability Index. Assessments will be made at baseline and at one, three and five weeks thereafter (that is, the five-week assessment will be made two weeks after treatment cessation). DISCUSSION: This randomized controlled pilot trial will inform the design of a further full-scale trial. The outcomes will provide some resources for incorporating acupuncture into existing pain management methods such as interlaminar epidural steroid injection in low-grade spondylolisthesis. TRIAL REGISTRATION: This trial is registered with the US National Institutes of Health Clinical Trials registry: NCT01909284.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.085 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".