Auricular Acupuncture During Chemotherapy Infusion in Breast Cancer Patients: A Feasibility Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy experience multiple distressing symptoms. The authors investigated the feasibility and potential benefits of auricular acupuncture during chemotherapy infusion in this population. Materials and Methods: Women with stage I–III breast cancer undergoing chemotherapy were enrolled and followed for three chemotherapy cycles. During the first cycle of chemotherapy that participants received after study enrollment, they were provided with educational materials. During the second and third cycles of chemotherapy after enrollment, they received auricular acupuncture. The primary outcome was feasibility, assessed by recruitment, retention, and completion of assessments. Secondary outcomes included symptom burden (Edmonton Symptom Assessment System-Revised Version) and anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-State), assessed at four timepoints for each cycle: day 1, pre-education/acupuncture (T1); day 1, post-education/acupuncture (T2); day 2 (T3); and day 5 (T4). Nausea and vomiting (Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer [MASCC] Antiemesis Tool) were assessed on days 2 and 5. Paired t test was used to compare patient-reported outcomes during cycle 1 (education) versus an average of outcomes during cycles 2 and 3 (acupuncture). Results: Twenty-six patients were enrolled, of which 24 completed all acupuncture sessions and 22 completed all outcome assessments. In cycles 2 and 3 versus cycle 1, participants experienced significant reductions in symptom burden (change from T1 to T4: −7.9 ± 13.6, p = 0.02), anxiety (change from T1 to T2: −3.3 ± 6.5, p = 0.02), and nausea severity on day 2 (−1.3 ± 2.6, p = 0.04). Conclusions: The delivery of auricular acupuncture during chemotherapy infusion was feasible and associated with reduction of symptom burden, anxiety, and nausea in breast cancer patients. Larger-scale clinical studies are needed to confirm these findings. Clinical Trial Registration number: NCT03170648.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.003 | 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".