Neuroimaging evidence for central mechanisms of acupuncture in non-specific low back pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: Non-specific low back pain (NSLBP) is a prevalent disorder with significant global health impacts. This systematic review and meta-analysis assessed acupuncture's clinical effectiveness for NSLBP and explored its brain mechanisms using fMRI. Methods: A comprehensive search of multiple databases (PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Science Direct, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang Data, Chinese Technical Periodicals Database, and Chinese Biomedical Literature Database) was conducted from inception to July 11th, 2024. We included randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or non-RCTs resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe the effect of acupuncture on NSLBP. GingerALE 3.0.2 was used as the meta-analysis tool, and meta-analysis was performed in the Montreal Neurological Institute coordinate space. Results: < 0.001). Neuroimaging analyses revealed distinct brain activation patterns: acute NSLBP showed positive activation in the right sub-lobar insula, inferior parietal lobule, medial frontal gyrus, and cingulate gyrus, while chronic NSLBP demonstrated positive activation in bilateral sub-lobar insula and negative activation in motor and prefrontal regions. Conclusion: Acupuncture shows significant efficacy for NSLBP, modulating pain processing through the insula and limbic system. While these results suggest therapeutic potential for both acute and chronic NSLBP, higher-quality research is needed to validate these mechanisms. Systematic review registration: Prospero registration number: CRD42022342438, URL: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/view/CRD42022342438.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.032 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".