Feasibility and Preliminary Effects of Acupuncture for Cognitive Dysfunction in Diverse Cancer Survivors: A Pilot, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
(1) Background: This pilot study evaluates the feasibility and preliminary effects of acupuncture for cancer-related cognitive dysfunction (CRCD) in cancer survivors. (2) Methods: A randomized trial comparing real acupuncture (RA) to sham acupuncture (SA) and waitlist control (WLC) among cancer survivors reporting cognitive difficulties. Interventions were delivered weekly over 10 weeks. Feasibility was evaluated by recruitment, treatment adherence, and assessment completion. Subjective CRCD was assessed by the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Cognitive Function-Perceived Cognitive Impairment subscale (FACT-Cog PCI) and objective CRCD was assessed by the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test-Revised (HVLT-R). (3) Results: 32 participants (57.1% of eligible patients) were enrolled. All participants in acupuncture groups completed ≥8 of 10 treatments. Assessment completion rate was 100% for all participants. From baseline to week 10, the RA group (n = 19) reported a clinically meaningful 17.3-point increase in FACT-Cog PCI (95% confidence interval [CI] 12.5 to 22.1), compared to 9.7 points (95% CI 2.8 to 16.7) in the SA group (n = 9), and 6.8 points (95% CI -3.7 to 17.2) in the WLC group (n = 4). In the subgroup analysis among patients with a below-average baseline HVLT-R (T-score < 50), the RA group (n = 8) increased FACT-Cog PCI scores by 20.4 (95% CI 13.6 to 27.3), compared to 11.1 points (95% CI 0.6 to 21.5) in the SA group (n = 5). The improvements from RA persisted through week 16 in both the total sample and the sub-group. Eleven mild adverse events were reported, with pain and bleeding at the needling sites being the most common. (4) Conclusions: The findings support the feasibility and safety of conducting a randomized, placebo-controlled trial to evaluate acupuncture for cognitive dysfunction in cancer survivors.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 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 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".