Early Referral to Physical Therapy: A Reasonable Choice for Primary Care Patients With Sciatica

Identifying the neural marker of chronic sciatica using multimodal neuroimaging and machine learning analyses

INTRODUCTION

Sciatica is a pain disorder often caused by the herniated disk compressing the lumbosacral nerve roots. Neuroimaging studies have identified functional abnormalities in patients with chronic sciatica (CS). However, few studies have investigated the neural marker of CS using brain structure and the classification value of multidimensional neuroimaging features in CS patients is unclear.

METHODS

Here, structural and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was acquired for 34 CS patients and 36 matched healthy controls (HCs). We analyzed cortical surface area, cortical thickness, amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF), regional homogeneity (REHO), between-regions functional connectivity (FC), and assessed the correlation between neuroimaging measures and clinical scores. Finally, the multimodal neuroimaging features were used to differentiate the CS patients and HC individuals by support vector machine (SVM) algorithm.

RESULTS

Compared to HC, CS patients had a larger cortical surface area in the right banks of the superior temporal sulcus and rostral anterior cingulate; higher ALFF value in the left inferior frontal gyrus; enhanced FCs between somatomotor and ventral attention network. Three FCs values were associated with clinical pain scores. Furthermore, the three multimodal neuroimaging features with significant differences between groups and the SVM algorithm could classify CS patients and HC with an accuracy of 90.00%.

DISCUSSION

Together, our findings revealed extensive reorganization of local functional properties, surface area, and network metrics in CS patients. The success of patient identification highlights the potential of using artificial intelligence and multimodal neuroimaging markers in chronic pain research.

The study on the clinical effectiveness and safety of traditional Chinese medicine acupoint catgut embedding guided by musculoskeletal ultrasound in the treatment of nerve root sciatica: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

BACKGROUND

Nerve root sciatica (NRS) is a common orthopedic disease, which usually occurs between 20 and 40 years of age, and the incidence rate is increasing year by year and is being younger. The disease has no special effect of treatment, clinically generally taking the symptomatic treatment, such as taking short-term glucocorticoids, sedatives, analgesics, and so on. Long-term use of drugs will adversely affect the patient's gastrointestinal tract, liver, and kidney function. The surgical treatment has a high risk of surgery, high cost, side effects, and other problems, so the choice of treatment method has always been a difficult problem in clinical and scientific research. The study shows that 90% of patients with sciatica can be cured by non-surgical treatment, so conservative therapy is often used in the treatment of sciatica, traditional Chinese medicine treatment methods in the treatment of NRS has been widely used, which has achieved good results, but there is no evidence of evidence-based medicine. Therefore, this study uses systematic evaluation to conduct the scientific evaluation of the clinical effectiveness and safety of traditional Chinese medicine acupoint catgut embedding guided by musculoskeletal ultrasound in the treatment of NRS, and provide evidence-based medical evidence support for the treatment of NRS.

METHODS

Using the computer to retrieve the PubMed, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Embase, Cochrane Library, CNKI, VIP, WANFANG Database, and CBM. Using the subject words and terminology words to retrieve the Chinese-English database and retrieve a randomized controlled study on the clinical effectiveness and safety of traditional Chinese medicine acupoint catgut embedding guided by musculoskeletal ultrasound in the treatment of NRS, and the range of search time is January 1990 to January 2021. The searched literature is screened and evaluated by two researchers respectively according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. If there is disagreement, discussing it with the third researcher to determine the final inclusion of the literature. Using the RevMan 5.3 software to conduct the meta-analysis.

RESULTS

This study will compare the effectiveness and safety of traditional Chinese medicine acupoint catgut embedding guided by musculoskeletal ultrasound in the treatment of NRS.

CONCLUSION

The results of this study will be published in internationally influential academic journals to provide evidence-based medical evidence for the clinical effectiveness and safety of traditional Chinese medicine acupoint catgut embedding in the treatment of NRS.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION

This study does not involve specific patients, and all research data comes from publicly available professional literature, so an ethics committee is not required to conduct an ethical review and approval of the study.

OSF REGISTRATION NUMBER

DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/Q492E.