Effectiveness and feasibility of acupuncture for knee osteoarthritis: a pilot randomized controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE:: To evaluate the effectiveness of acupuncture for pain relief and function improvement in patients with knee osteoarthritis and to determine the feasibility of an eight-week acupuncture intervention. DESIGN:: Pilot randomized controlled trial. SETTING:: Three teaching hospitals in China. SUBJECTS:: Patients with knee osteoarthritis (Kellgren grade II or III). INTERVENTIONS:: Patients were randomly assigned to an eight-week (three sessions per week) intervention of either traditional Chinese acupuncture or sham acupuncture. MAIN MEASURES:: The primary outcome was response rate-the proportion of patients achieving score ⩾36% decrease in Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) pain and function at week 8 compared with baseline. Secondary outcomes included pain, function and quality of life. RESULTS:: Of 42 patients randomized, 36 (85.7%) completed the study. There was no significant difference in response rate between the traditional Chinese acupuncture and control groups: 61.9% (13 of 21) versus 42.9% (9 of 21) achieved score ⩾36% decrease in WOMAC pain and function at week 8 ( P = 0.217). The sum of WOMAC pain and function scores at week 8 was 11.6 (9.1) in the traditional Chinese acupuncture group compared with 16.3 (10.9) in the control group ( P = 0.183). There was no significant difference between groups. Three adverse events were recorded and were classified as mild. CONCLUSION:: It showed that three sessions per week acupuncture intervention of knee osteoarthritis was feasible and safe. No difference was observed between groups due to small sample size. Larger (sample size ⩾ 296) randomized controlled trials of this intervention appear justified.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.154 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".