Self-administered acupressure for knee osteoarthritis in middle-aged and older adults: a pilot randomized controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To test the acceptability and feasibility of self-administered acupressure as an intervention for knee pain among middle-aged and older adults with knee osteoarthritis (KOA). METHODS: In this pilot randomized controlled trial, 35 participants with KOA were randomized to receive self-administered acupressure (n = 17, two self-administered acupressure training sessions followed by self-practice for 6 weeks) or knee health education (n = 18, two health education sessions about KOA management followed by self-care for 6 weeks). Current pain intensity (primary outcome) was measured using a Numeric Rating Scale (NRS) at baseline and weeks 1, 2, 4 and 6 (post-intervention). Secondary outcome measures included worst and least pain intensity, the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC), range of motion (ROM) of the knee joints and Short-Form Six-Dimension (SF-6D) scores for health-related quality of life. RESULTS: Participants in both groups attended all training sessions. In the self-administered acupressure group, all subjects mastered the acupressure technique and passed a consistency check. Both groups showed a decreasing trend in current knee pain intensity measured using NRS post-intervention. A medium between-group effect size (0.40) was found, but between-group differences were not statistically significant. The other secondary outcome measures were also comparable between both groups post-intervention (all p > 0.05). CONCLUSION: A two-session self-administered acupressure training was acceptable to and feasible in participants with KOA. The data generated allowed for calculation of a sample size for a definitive randomized controlled trial (RCT) to confirm whether self-acupressure is effective for pain management in KOA. Furthermore trials with adequate power and longer follow-up periods are warranted.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".