You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 9, Issue 8
  • Identification of the optimal points for the acupuncture treatment of neck pain in China: protocol for a multicenter, matched, case-control study

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

XML
Complementary medicine
Protocol
Identification of the optimal points for the acupuncture treatment of neck pain in China: protocol for a multicenter, matched, case-control study
  1. Mingsheng Sun1,
  2. Siyuan Tao2,
  3. Guoyan Geng1,
  4. Jieru Peng2,
  5. Xingsha Ma1,
  6. Mingxi Yan1,
  7. Jiao Chen1,
  8. Dingjun Cai1,
  9. Hui Zheng1,
  10. Chunxia Yang2,
  11. Ling Zhao1,
  12. Fan-rong Liang1
  1. 1 College of Acupuncture and Tuina, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu, China
  2. 2 West China School of Public Health, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
  1. Correspondence to Professor Fan-rong Liang; acuresearch{at}126.com; Professor Ling Zhao; zhaoling{at}cdutcm.edu.cn

Abstract

Introduction Neck pain (NP) is a common condition that can be effectively treated by acupuncture. However, several treatment point prescriptions (ie, local acupoints, distal acupoints, and sensitised acupoints) may be used. The present study aims to identify the types of sensitisation and the distribution of sensitised points in patients with NP, to analyse the cut-off values and sensitisation rate for acupoint sensitisation, and to summarise the dominant forms of optimally sensitised points. This information will be helpful when choosing the optimal points to treat NP.

Methods and analysis This multicentre, matched, case–control study will enrol 224 patients with NP, and 224 age-matched and sex-matched healthy participants as controls. Body surface temperature, mechanical pain threshold, pressure pain threshold and skin resistance will be assessed at the 15 acupoints most frequently used to treat NP, and at the five body regions in which pain occurs most frequently. Hypothesis testing will be used to compare the differences in variables between cases and controls. In addition, receiver operating characteristic curve analysis will be used to explore the cut-off values of the sensitive states of heat, pain and electrical resistance, which indicate sensitisation of the acupoint. The optimal points will be comprehensively determined by the acupoint sensitisation rate and OR.

Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval of this study has been granted by the Research Ethical Committee of the Teaching Hospital of Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (ID: 2018 KL-016). The outcomes of the study will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications.

Trial registration ChiCTR1800016220.

  • sensitized points
  • neck pain
  • study protocol
  • observational study

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-029194

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • MS, ST and GG contributed equally.

    • Contributors MS, ST, JP, DC, CY, HZ, LZ and FL participated in the design of the trial, in creating the data analysis plan, and in drafting the manuscript. GG, XM, MY, and JC collected the information needed for the performance of this trial in each center. All of the authors discussed, read, and revised the manuscript, and gave final approval for the publication of this study protocol.

    • Funding This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (numbers 81590951, 81722050).

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Ethics approval The study protocol has been approved by the institutional review board and ethics committee of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (May 2018) (approval number: 2018 KL-016).

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.