BACKGROUND： When performing clinical trials involving acupuncture, it can be difficult to choose a placebo control. OBJECTIVE： To validate the Park sham needle for use as a double-blind control intervention. DESIGN,...BACKGROUND： When performing clinical trials involving acupuncture, it can be difficult to choose a placebo control. OBJECTIVE： To validate the Park sham needle for use as a double-blind control intervention. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS AND INTERVENTIONS： Two different methods were employed. First, a researcher blinded to needle type administered the Park sham or a real needle, chosen at random, on the arms of 16 healthy volunteers. The researcher and the volunteers independently recorded which needle type they thought had been applied at each acupuncture point. Second, 19 patients with shoulder impingement syndrome were randomly assigned to receive acupuncture applied with the real needle or the Park sham needle, once a week for 6 weeks alongside a course of physiotherapy. At the end of the 6 sessions the patients recorded which needle type they thought was being used. The results were analyzed with a Fisher＇s exact test. This study was carried out in the Outpatient Department of Physiotherapy in Chafing Cross Hospital, London, UK, on healthy volunteers and patients with shoulder impingement pain. The age range was 23 to 54 and 22 to 74 years respectively. RESULTS： Of the healthy volunteers, there was no difference （P=0.23） between the number of needles that were correctly （n=43） or incorrectly identified （n=53）. All patients thought that they had received the real needles. The researcher correctly identified all needles that were applied. CONCLUSION： The researcher delivering the acupuncture recognized the needle type. However, both healthy and patient volunteers were blind to the needle type. This demonstrates that the Park sham needle is an effective single-blind control. It should be noted that the number of patients recruited was small and the study was underpowered to detect an effect of treatment.展开更多
Purpose： We propose and apply a simplified nowcasting model to understand the correlations between social attention and topic trends of scientific publications. Design/methodology/approach： First, topics are generat...Purpose： We propose and apply a simplified nowcasting model to understand the correlations between social attention and topic trends of scientific publications. Design/methodology/approach： First, topics are generated from the obesity corpus by using the latent Dirichlet allocation （LDA） algorithm and time series of keyword search trends in Google Trends are obtained. We then establish the structural time series model using data from January 2004 to December 2012, and evaluate the model using data from January 2013. We employ a state-space model to separate different non-regression components in an observational time series （i.e. the tendency and the seasonality） and apply the ＂spike and slab prior＂ and stepwise regression to analyze the correlations between the regression component and the social media attention. The two parts are combined using Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling techniques to obtain our results. Findings： The results of our study show that （1） the number of publications on child obesity increases at a lower rate than that of diabetes publications; （2） the number of publication on a given topic may exhibit a relationship with the season or time of year; and （3） there exists a correlation between the number of publications on a given topic and its social media attention, i.e. the search frequency related to that topic as identified by Google Trends. We found that our model is also able to predict the number of publications related to a given topic.展开更多
基金supported by the Imperial College London, Acupuncture Association of Chartered Physiotherapists and the Therapy Department at Imperial College NHS Trust
文摘BACKGROUND： When performing clinical trials involving acupuncture, it can be difficult to choose a placebo control. OBJECTIVE： To validate the Park sham needle for use as a double-blind control intervention. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS AND INTERVENTIONS： Two different methods were employed. First, a researcher blinded to needle type administered the Park sham or a real needle, chosen at random, on the arms of 16 healthy volunteers. The researcher and the volunteers independently recorded which needle type they thought had been applied at each acupuncture point. Second, 19 patients with shoulder impingement syndrome were randomly assigned to receive acupuncture applied with the real needle or the Park sham needle, once a week for 6 weeks alongside a course of physiotherapy. At the end of the 6 sessions the patients recorded which needle type they thought was being used. The results were analyzed with a Fisher＇s exact test. This study was carried out in the Outpatient Department of Physiotherapy in Chafing Cross Hospital, London, UK, on healthy volunteers and patients with shoulder impingement pain. The age range was 23 to 54 and 22 to 74 years respectively. RESULTS： Of the healthy volunteers, there was no difference （P=0.23） between the number of needles that were correctly （n=43） or incorrectly identified （n=53）. All patients thought that they had received the real needles. The researcher correctly identified all needles that were applied. CONCLUSION： The researcher delivering the acupuncture recognized the needle type. However, both healthy and patient volunteers were blind to the needle type. This demonstrates that the Park sham needle is an effective single-blind control. It should be noted that the number of patients recruited was small and the study was underpowered to detect an effect of treatment.
基金supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2012-2012S1A3A2033291)the Yonsei University Future-leading Research Initiative of 2014
文摘Purpose： We propose and apply a simplified nowcasting model to understand the correlations between social attention and topic trends of scientific publications. Design/methodology/approach： First, topics are generated from the obesity corpus by using the latent Dirichlet allocation （LDA） algorithm and time series of keyword search trends in Google Trends are obtained. We then establish the structural time series model using data from January 2004 to December 2012, and evaluate the model using data from January 2013. We employ a state-space model to separate different non-regression components in an observational time series （i.e. the tendency and the seasonality） and apply the ＂spike and slab prior＂ and stepwise regression to analyze the correlations between the regression component and the social media attention. The two parts are combined using Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling techniques to obtain our results. Findings： The results of our study show that （1） the number of publications on child obesity increases at a lower rate than that of diabetes publications; （2） the number of publication on a given topic may exhibit a relationship with the season or time of year; and （3） there exists a correlation between the number of publications on a given topic and its social media attention, i.e. the search frequency related to that topic as identified by Google Trends. We found that our model is also able to predict the number of publications related to a given topic.
