Electroacupuncture May Improve Burning and Electric Shock-Like Neuropathic Pain: A Prospective Exploratory Pilot Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: To test the effectiveness of electroacupuncture (EA) for managing intractable neuropathic pain (NeP) and assess the protocol for a larger confirmatory trial. Design: A prospective, multicenter, single-armed, add-on, pilot study. Settings/location: At two tertiary university-based hospitals in Seoul, Republic of Korea. Subjects: Patients with chronic peripheral NeP, who have received conventional oral medications but complained of moderate to severe pain. Interventions: Two Korean medicine doctors conducted 12 sessions of EA (2 sessions per week for 4 weeks, followed by 1 session per week for the second month) in addition to conventional treatment. Outcome measures: During the 8-week treatment period, pain intensity, pain natures such as burning, electric shock-like, temperature or mechanical hyperalgesia, and numbness, Short Form of the McGill Pain Questionnaire (SF-MPQ) and the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI-SF), the EuroQol five dimensions questionnaire, patients' satisfaction, and adverse events were evaluated. The primary endpoint was a change in pain intensity (%) at 4 weeks from the baseline. Results: Among 22 patients, 19 finished the protocol. The eight EA sessions over a month reduced pain intensity from 6.0 ± 1.6 at baseline to 3.2 ± 0.9 at 4 weeks, which was a 46.7% reduction (p < 0.001). The incidences of severe burning, electric shock-like pain, and mechanical hyperalgesia reduced at 8 weeks [36%–16% (p = 0.04), 53%–21% (p = 0.009), and 53%–26% (p = 0.03), respectively]. The affective dimensions in the SF-MPQ (p = 0.007) and the pain interference parameters, including mood (p = 0.02), relations with other people (p = 0.03), and enjoyment of life (p = 0.002) in the BPI-SF, were improved at 4 and 8 weeks. The majority of patients (68%) responded that their pain was “much or somewhat improved.” Overall, 84.2% expressed “satisfaction” with their multidisciplinary management. Conclusions: EA might decrease the intensity of NeP, in particular, such as burning, electric shock-like pain, and mechanical hyperalgesia, which was accompanied by psychosocial and functional improvement. A larger study is warranted to prove the effectiveness of EA for managing refractory NeP. Trial registration:ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT03315598. Retrospectively registered on October 20, 2017.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".