GLOSSÁRIO
Termos comumente utilizados nas pesquisas com acupuntura
| TERMO | DEFINIÇÃO | REFERÊNCIA |
| Acupuncture: | In a broad sense refers to interventions that use any stimulation on acupuncture points, including manual acupuncture, electric acupuncture (electroacupuncture), acupressure, moxibustion, warm needling, fire needling, transcutaneous electrical nerve, laser acupuncture, microsystem acupuncture, thread-embedding therapy, medicine acicula, point injection, acupoint paste; magnetic acupuncture, blood-letting therapy, acupotomy. |
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| Acupuncture point: | The point in humans where stimulation and manipulation are performed in acupuncture therapies. | WHO, 2007; |
| Conventional medicine: | Is defined as pharmacological, and other non-pharmacological used in conventional medicine systems to treat, prevent disease, or restore, correct, or modify physiological function. | WHO, 2019. |
| Exercise: |
“Exercise … is a sub‐category of physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and aims to improve or maintain one or more components of physical fitness promote good physical health”. Is defined as “a series of specific movements with the aim of training or developing the body by a routine practice or as physical training to promote good physical health” . This encompasses a heterogeneous set of treatments prescribed or planned by a health professional that include conducting specific activities, postures and/or movements with a goal to reduce pain and functional limitations. Exercise can incorporate aerobic exercise, specific muscle strengthening, balance and flexibility exercises. It can be prescribed and delivered by different healthcare professionals such as physiotherapists or doctors or it can be conducted by individuals within their own home or community. Exercise can be delivered in a variety of ways, including individually designed or standardized programmes, in a supervised or unsupervised format, either individually or in groups. |
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Mind-body exercise: |
A form of exercise that combines body movement, mental focus, and controlled breathing to improve strength, balance, flexibility, and overall health. Examples of mind-body exercises are yoga, tai chi, and qigong. | NCI/NIH |
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Physical activity: |
Any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that requires energy expenditure, including activities undertaken while working, playing, carrying out household chores, travelling, and engaging in recreational pursuits. | WHO, 2015 |
| Placebo treatment: | Is similar in every way to the experimental treatment except that is does not contain the active component tha comprises the intervention´s action. | Portney LG, 2020. |
| Sham treatment: | Is analogous to a placebo but is used when treatments require physical or mechanical intervention. A sham is similar to the active treatment but has a benign effect. | Portney LG, 2020. |
| Sham acupuncture treatment: | A control procedure that, ideally, is identical in appearance and experience to acupuncture but lacks any of the presumed treatment-specific effects. Sham acupuncture is sometimes categorised as either penetrating (invasive) or non-penetrating (non-invasive) in the belief that there might be more physiological effects with penetration. | MacPherson H et al., 2007. |
| Sham exercise: | Can be understood as the prescription of exercise in a purposely incorrect or theoretically irrelevant way regarding the type (movement, contraction) and dose (intensity, frequency, period, duration). | Geneen et al., 2017. |
| Adjunctive therapy: | Is defined as a non-surgical and nonpharmacological intervention used in combination with exercise therapy in the management of hip or knee osteoarthritis. | French HP et al., 2022. |
| Manual joint mobilisation techniques: | All manual joint mobilisation techniques aiming to affect joints, muscles and connective tissue in the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spine. That implies mobilisation or manipulation within the joints’ normal range of motion, i.e. mobilisation as well as manipulation of the spine. The intervention had to be performed by relevant professional staff. | (PMID: 34404258). |
| Supervised physical activity: | The physical activity program had to be supervised or instructed by relevant professional staff. Minimum intervention period was six weeks. Exercise was defined according to the WHO definition: A subcategory of physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and purposeful in the sense that the improvement or maintenance of one or more components of physical fitness is the objective. | (PMID: 34404258). |
| Psychological treatment: | The treatment included individual or group-based interventions performed by a professional with knowledge and experience regarding patients with a specific health condition. Interventions included various types of therapy basically addressing self-efficacy aiming at secondary prevention and increased quality of life by improving both, the understanding of the disease and the coping strategies. Interventions had to be manualised or standardised. | (PMID: 34404258). |
| Patient education: | The intervention had to contain disease specific education on individual or class level assuring sufficient knowledge about the disease and its handling. Disease specific education addressed patients and their family members and comprised information about the disease, its treatment, medication overuse, self-care, life-style, physical activity, balanced diet, and sleep. Didactic methods might include exercise, home-exercise, and dialogue. The intervention had to be conducted by a trained professional. | (PMID: 34404258). |
Operacionalização dos conceitos:
- Standardization of concepts ICF 2001: Disability = incapacidade; Functioning = funcionalidade; Body functions = funções do corpo; Impairments = deficiências; Activity limitations = limitações de atividade; Environmental factors = fatores ambientais;
- Characteristics of the population (e.g. age, sex, cognitive stage, duration and/or severity of disease, phenotype, skills, or personal preferences and joy);
- Demographic characteristics (i.e., participants’ diagnoses, mean age, ratio of sex);
- Parameters of the intervention (e.g. mode, intensity, frequency, complexity, supervision and feedback, specificity, personalization, or use of technology);
- Experimental details (i.e., types of mind–body exercise, average duration of practice in years, and control group);
- Further research is required to investigate how to sustain positive effects of exercise over time and to determine essential attributes of exercise (mode, intensity, frequency, duration, timing);
- Aspects of the study design (e.g. timing of assessment relative to medication status);
- Regarding the control group conditions, given some studies utilized control groups with participants performing regular physical exercise (e.g. treadmill walking/usual physical exercise regime) while other studies adopted waitlist control groups (e.g. not doing mind–body exercise while also not engaging in any kinds of physical exercise regime), studies with physical exercise as a control condition were recoded as having an “active control group”, while studies with waitlist control groups were recoded as having a “waitlist control group”;
- Non-exercise (a waiting list, a minimal intervention, or usual care);
- Acupuncture was defined as a treatment where thin needles are inserted into the body including dry-needling and trigger point acupuncture excluding electroacupuncture. (PMID: 34418953).
- “Acupuncture” is a therapeutic intervention involving percutaneous mechanical, thermal, or electrical stimulation via needling of specific locations on the body. (PMID: 32009889)
- Commonly applied acupunctural techniques comprise trigger point acupuncture, electro-acupuncture, and dry needling. Intervention using thin, skin penetrating needles including “dry needling” and “trigger-pointacupuncture”. Electro-acupuncture was excluded. The intervention period should consist of minimum six treatment sessions.(PMID: 34404258).
- Needling therapies (e.g. acupuncture, dry needling) may have a central effect on patients beyond the local tissue effects, reducing patients’ pain and disability due to alterations in neural processing, including the default mode network (DMN), and potentially other central nervous system effects. (PMID: 36484262).
- Exercises aiming at the improvement or maintenance of one or more components of physical fitness (e.g. neck shoulder exercises as well as aerobic exercises, including high-intensity interval training and moderate continuous training), muscle relaxation and contract-relax techniques.(PMID: 34404258).
- Manual joint mobilising treatment, osteopathic manipulative treatment, chiropractic spinal manipulative treatment, and reflexotherapy are other examples illustrating the diversity of the techniques. (PMID: 34404258).
- Psychological treatment approaches (autogenic training, systematic relaxation, mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral sleep modification), patient education, self-care nursing, Yoga, biofeedback-assisted diaphragmatic breathing. (PMID: 34404258).
- The questionnaire focused on the patients’ expectations regarding interventions by physiotherapists, chiropractors, psychologists, acupuncture and education (lectures/classes) as well as the likelihood with which patients would ask for a specific intervention again. (PMID: 34404258).
- Patient preferences were based on the interdisciplinary expert opinion of the working group and the reference group as well as on patient involvement comprising the answers of 380 patients to a questionnaire of the Danish Knowledge Center for Headache, which was distributed via Facebook and patient associations. (PMID: 34404258).
- Methodological characteristics of the included studies (eg, large (n>100) vs small sample sizes (n<100). (PMID: 22554843).
- The smallest benefit of value to patients is called the minimal clinically important difference (MCID). The MCID is a patient-centered concept, capturing both the magnitude of the improvement and also the value patients place on the change. Using patient-centered MCIDs is important for studies involving patient-reported outcomes, (PMID: 25268441) for which the clinical importance of a given change may not be obvious to clinicians selecting treatments. The MCID defines the smallest amount an outcome must change to be meaningful to patients (PMID: 2691207).
- Treatment effects are considered specific if they are attributable solely, according to the theory of the mechanism of action, to the characteristic component of an intervention. Effects which are associated with the incidental elements of an intervention are considered nonspecific effects (synonymous with placebo effects). Nonspecific effects are mostly thought to be due to psychobiologic processes triggered by the overall therapeutic context. They have to be distinguished from the natural course of disease, regression to the mean, effects of being in a study, cointerventions and, as far as possible, from reporting and other biases. The total effect of an intervention consists of both specific and nonspecific effects. (PMID: 21092261).
- Effective Rate (ER) = (“total number of patients” – “number of patients without response”) /total number of patients; “no response” is defined as no significant change in VAS score after treatment. (PMID: 37143907).
