Prior acupuncture experience among elderly participants enrolled in a clinical trial of acupuncture for chronic low back pain: Implications for future trials

Background The effectiveness of acupuncture for chronic low back pain (cLBP) has not been studied specifically in the 65-and-older population. To inform the validity and generalizability of future acupuncture studies among older adults, we characterized elderly participants’ prior experience with and views toward acupuncture and tested for clinical and sociodemographic differences between acupuncture-naïve and non-naïve participants. Methods Data for this study were collected during the baseline telephone interview from the participants enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California site of an NIH-funded, multicenter clinical trial of acupuncture for cLBP in older adults. Results Nearly two-thirds (65.6%) of participants surveyed reported they had previously received acupuncture treatment with the vast majority seeking acupuncture treatment for pain-related issues (84.8%). The majority of these participants reported relatively modest levels of exposure to acupuncture with most participants (63.1%) reporting fewer than 10 treatment sessions over their lifetimes. There were no significant differences in age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability scores, income levels, or pain levels between the acupuncture-naïve and non-naïve groups. Conclusion Contextual consideration for prior acupuncture utilization rates is warranted and may be higher than expected or previously reported. We found few differences in baseline characteristics between participants who were acupuncture-naïve and those with prior acupuncture experience; thus, future pragmatic clinical trials might relax previous acupuncture-use considerations in their recruitment criteria. For trials focused on acupuncture-naïve patients, it may be more feasible to expand the definition of "acupuncture-naïve" based on lifetime acupuncture visits or time since last treatment.Trial registration/Protocol registration: clinicaltrials.gov (#NCT04982315)