Background: Whether the clinical effect of acupuncture in chronic pain is effective has always been a hot topic of research, which has a great relationship with the overall reporting descriptions of acupuncture, especially the sham acupuncture intervention. To confirm the effectiveness of acupuncture, more clinical studies are often required. Therefore, it is necessary to report high-quality and complete descriptions of acupuncture in clinical trials. This study aims to assess the overall reporting quality of acupuncture for chronic pain in randomized controlled trials (RCTs).
Methods: Three databases from inception to March 2020 were searched, to assess the quality of acupuncture reports included the RCTs based on the pain-specific supplement to Consolidated Standards for Reporting Trials (CONSORT) and Standards for Reporting Interventions in Controlled Trials of Acupuncture (STRICTA) guidelines. The quality of sham acupuncture descriptions was evaluated based on the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR)-placebo checklist. Descriptive statistics and analysis of the results were carried out according to the percentage of each item.
Results: A total of 74 RCTs were included which met the inclusion criteria. Based on the pain-specific CONSORT, the reporting rates of “Statistical methods”, “Participant flow”, and “Blinding” were “ 52.70%”, “ 70.27%”, and “ 77.03%”, respectively. The weakest reported items in STRICTA were related to the depth of insertion (Item 2c, 54.05%) and the setting and context of treatment (Item 4b, 0.00%). Based on the TIDieR-placebo checklist, the reporting rates of “Item 12”, “Item 11”, “Item 13”, “Item 3”, and “Item 4” were “ 8.11%”, “ 10.81%”, “ 29.73%”, “ 44.59% ”, and “ 47.30%”, respectively.
Conclusion: At present, the overall report quality of acupuncture treatment for chronic pain in English journals is acceptable, but the report rate in some aspects is still low. In the future, researchers should report RCTs of acupuncture following cleaner checklists and guidelines.
Keywords: randomized controlled trials, overall reporting quality, sham acupuncture, chronic pain