The time course of the analgesic effect of acupuncture in the treatment of lateral epicondylalgia : a randomized controlled feasibility trial comparing standard acupuncture and electroacupuncture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Resistance exercise is effective in relieving pain and improving grip strength in patients with lateral epicondylalgia (LE). However, patients’ activity-related pain can hinder their active participation in an exercise program. Acupuncture, particularly electro-acupuncture (EA), may be an effective complementary modality for pain control in order to promote patients’ participation in an exercise program and further to enhance therapeutic effects. Objectives: 1) assess the feasibility of a study designed to compare the effect size of analgesia induced by EA vs. standard acupuncture (SA); 2) estimate the time course of the analgesic effect of EA and SA for patients with LE; and 3) investigate if the analgesic effect of either intervention is associated with a change in pain-free grip strength. Methods: A double-blind, parallel-group randomized controlled feasibility trial was conducted at a research centre located in Vancouver, Canada. Twenty-one participants with unilateral LE lasting more than 6 weeks duration were enrolled in the study. The participants were randomly allocated to receive a single treatment of either EA (10-30 Hz) or SA. The primary outcome measure was pain-free grip strength, and the secondary outcome measures included the severity of lateral elbow pain (numeric rating scale), and patients’ global rating of change. Outcomes were measured over a 72-hour period. Results: No significant differences in outcome measures were found between the two treatment groups at any time point. A pattern of gradual improvement of pain-free grip strength (approximately 12N /day) over the 72-hour monitoring period in both treatment groups was observed, and this improvement was statistically significant compared to baseline at the 72-hour time point (38 ± 13N). In contrast, there was a statistically significant reduction in patients’ perceived pain level immediately after either treatment, and this improvement was maintained throughout the 72-hour follow-up period (-0.99~-1.59 ± 0.35). After 24 hours, 5% of patients reported themselves as feeling ‘much better’, 55% ‘slightly better’, 15% ‘unchanged’, 10% ‘slightly worse’, 10% ‘moderately worse’ and 5% ‘much worse’. Conclusion: Acupuncture may complement the therapeutic effect of rehabilitation exercise program as it provides immediate pain relief for patients with chronic LE. Trial registration: ISRCTN14667535 Funding: none
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".