anxiety
A reader of this blog recently sent me the following message: “Looks like this group followed you recent post about how to perform a CAM RCT!” A link directed me to a new trial of ear-acupressure. Today is ‘national acupuncture and oriental medicine day’ in the US, a good occasion perhaps to have a critical look at it.
The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of ear acupressure and massage vs. control in the improvement of pain, anxiety and depression in persons diagnosed with dementia.
For this purpose, the researchers recruited a total of 120 elderly dementia patients institutionalized in residential homes. The participants were randomly allocated, to three groups:
- Control group – they continued with their routine activities;
- Ear acupressure intervention group – they received ear acupressure treatment (pressure was applied to acupressure points on the ear);
- Massage therapy intervention group – they received relaxing massage therapy.
Pain, anxiety and depression were assessed with the Doloplus2, Cornell and Campbell scales. The study was carried out during 5 months; three months of experimental treatment and two months with no treatment. The assessments were done at baseline, each month during the treatment and at one and two months of follow-up.
A total of 111 participants completed the study. The ear acupressure intervention group showed better improvements than the two other groups in relation to pain and depression during the treatment period and at one month of follow-up. The best improvement in pain was achieved in the last (3rd) month of ear acupressure treatment. The best results regarding anxiety were also observed in the last month of treatment.
The authors concluded that ear acupressure and massage therapy showed better results than the control group in relation to pain, anxiety and depression. However, ear acupressure achieved more improvements.
The question is: IS THIS A RIGOROUS TRIAL?
My answer would be NO.
Now I better explain why, don’t I?
If we look at them critically, the results of this trial might merely prove that spending some time with a patient, being nice to her, administering a treatment that involves time and touch, etc. yields positive changes in subjective experiences of pain, anxiety and depression. Thus the results of this study might have nothing to do with the therapies per se.
And why would acupressure be more successful than massage therapy? Massage therapy is an ‘old hat’ for many patients; by contrast, acupressure is exotic and relates to mystical life forces etc. Features like that have the potential to maximise the placebo-response. Therefore it is conceivable that they have contributed to the superiority of acupressure over massage.
What I am saying is that the results of this trial can be interpreted in not just one but several ways. The main reason for that is the fact that the control group were not given an acceptable placebo, one that was indistinguishable from the real treatment. Patients were fully aware of what type of intervention they were getting. Therefore their expectations, possibly heightened by the therapists, determined the outcomes. Consequently there were factors at work which were totally beyond the control of the researchers and a clear causal link between the therapy and the outcome cannot be established.
An RCT that is aimed to test the effectiveness of a therapy but fails to establish such a causal link beyond reasonable doubt cannot be characterised as a rigorous study, I am afraid.
Sorry! Did I spoil your ‘national acupuncture and oriental medicine day’?
Many experts have warned us that, when we opt for dietary supplements, we might get more than we bargained for. A recent article reminded us that the increased availability and use of botanical dietary supplements and herbal remedies among consumers has been accompanied by an increased frequency of adulteration of these products with synthetic pharmaceuticals. Unscrupulous producers may add drugs and analogues of various classes, such as phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE-5) inhibitors, weight loss, hypoglycemic, antihypertensive and anti-inflammatory agents, or anabolic steroids, to develop or intensify biological effects of dietary supplements or herbal remedies. The presence of such adulterated products in the marketplace is a worldwide problem and their consumption poses health risks to consumers.
Other authors recently warned that these products are often ineffective, adulterated, mislabeled, or have unclear dosing recommendations, and consumers have suffered injury and death as a consequence. When Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, it stripped the Food and Drug Administration of its premarket authority, rendering regulatory controls too weak to adequately protect consumers. State government intervention is thus warranted. This article reviews studies reporting on Americans’ use of dietary supplements marketed for weight loss or muscle building, notes the particular dangers these products pose to the youth, and suggests that states can build on their historical enactment of regulatory controls for products with potential health consequences to protect the public and especially young people from unsafe and mislabeled dietary supplements.
A new study has shown that these problems are not just theoretical but are real and common.
Twenty-four products suspected of containing anabolic steroids and sold in fitness equipment shops in the UK were analyzed for their qualitative and semi-quantitative content using full scan gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), accurate mass liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), high pressure liquid chromatography with diode array detection (HPLC-DAD), UV-Vis, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. In addition, X-ray crystallography enabled the identification of one of the compounds, where reference standard was not available.
Of the 24 products tested, 23 contained steroids including known anabolic agents; 16 of these contained steroids that were different to those indicated on the packaging and one product contained no steroid at all. Overall, 13 different steroids were identified; 12 of these are controlled in the UK under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Several of the products contained steroids that may be considered to have considerable pharmacological activity, based on their chemical structures and the amounts present.
The authors concluded that such adulteration could unwittingly expose users to a significant risk to their health, which is of particular concern for naïve users.
The Internet offers thousands of supplements for sale; specifically for bodybuilders there are hundreds of supplements all claiming things that are untrue or untested. The lax regulations that exist in this area seem to be often ignored completely. I think it is important to inform customers that most supplements are a waste of money and some even a waste of health.
One of the most commonly ‘accepted’ indications for acupuncture is anxiety. Many trials have suggested that it is effective for that condition. But is this really true? To find out, we need someone to conduct a systematic review or meta-analysis.
Korean researchers have just published such a paper; they wanted to assess the preoperative anxiolytic efficacy of acupuncture therapy and therefore conducted a meta-analysis of all RCTs on the subject. Four electronic databases were searched up to February 2014. Data were included in the meta-analysis from RCTs in which groups receiving preoperative acupuncture treatment were compared with control groups receiving a placebo for anxiety.
Fourteen publications with a total of 1,034 patients were included. Six RCTs, using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-State (STAI-S), reported that acupuncture interventions led to greater reductions in preoperative anxiety relative to sham acupuncture. A further eight publications, employing visual analogue scales, also indicated significant differences in preoperative anxiety amelioration between acupuncture and sham acupuncture.
The authors concluded that aacupuncture therapy aiming at reducing preoperative anxiety has a statistically significant effect relative to placebo or nontreatment conditions. Well-designed and rigorous studies that employ large sample sizes are necessary to corroborate this finding.
From these conclusions most casual readers might get the impression that acupuncture is indeed effective. One has to dig a bit deeper to realise that is perhaps not so.
Why? Because the quality of the primary studies was often dismally poor. Most did not even mention adverse effects which, in my view, is a clear breach of publication ethics. What is more, all the studies were wide open to bias. The authors of the meta-analysis include in their results section the following short paragraph:
The 14 included studies exhibited various degrees of bias susceptibility (Figure 2 and Figure 3). The agreement rate, as measured using Cohen’s kappa, was 0.8 [32]. Only six studies reported concealed allocation; the other six described a method of adequate randomization, although the word “randomization” appeared in all of the articles. Thirteen studies prevented blinding of the participants. Participants in these studies had no previous experience of acupuncture. According to STRICTA, two studies enquired after patients’ beliefs as a group: there were no significant differences [20, 24].
There is a saying amongst experts about such meta-analyses: RUBBISH IN, RUBBISH OUT. It describes the fact that several poor studies, pooled meta-analytically, can never give a reliable result.
This does, however, not mean that such meta-analyses are necessarily useless. If the authors prominently (in the abstract) stress that the quality of the primary studies was wanting and that therefore the overall result is unreliable, they might inspire future researchers to conduct more rigorous trials and thus generate progress. Most importantly, by insisting on pointing out these limitations and by not drawing positive conclusions from flawed data, they would avoid misleading those health care professionals – and let’s face it, they are the majority – who merely read the abstract or even just the conclusions of such articles.
The authors of this review have failed to do any of this; they and the journal EBCAM have thus done a disservice to us all by contributing to the constant drip of misleading and false-positive information about the value of acupuncture.
