Modulation effect of acupuncture treatment on chronic neck and shoulder pain in female patients: Evidence from periaqueductal gray‐based functional connectivity
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: Chronic neck and shoulder pain (CNSP) is a common neurological disorder, which females are more likely to suffer from. The periaqueductal gray (PAG) plays a key role in the descending modulation of pain. This study aimed to investigate altered PAG-based functional connectivity (FC) in female patients with CNSP related to healthy controls (HCs) and the effect of acupuncture for female patients with CNSP using PAG-based FC biomarkers. METHODS: PAG-based FC value was calculated based on resting-state functional images and then compared between patients with CNSP at pre-acupuncture, post-acupuncture, and HCs. Then, correlational analyses were performed to examine the relationships between increased PAG-based FC strength and improved clinical parameters in patients after acupuncture treatment. RESULTS: Before acupuncture treatment, compared to HCs, patients with CSNP showed altered PAG-based FC with widely distributed brain regions, including the left medial superior frontal gyrus, bilateral posterior insula (pIns), and cingulate gyrus. After treatment, patients with CNSP exhibited specially improved PAG-pIns FC compared to that before treatment, and no significant difference was observed in the increased PAG-pIns FC strength between HCs and patients with CNSP after treatment. Furthermore, pain catastrophizing reduction was significantly correlated with the increased PAG-pIns FC strength in patients after treatment. CONCLUSION: The effect of acupuncture treatment may relate to the increased PAG-pIns FC, which significantly correlated with pain catastrophizing reduction after treatment. These findings shed important mechanistic information on the role of therapeutic approaches in treating chronic neck and shoulder pain.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it