Anxiety disorders: Reporting quality with a CONSORT-and-STRICTA based instrument

Abstract

Objective The OCSI system was applied to evaluate the quality of domestic and overseas randomized controlled trials(RCTs) of acupuncture treatment for anxiety disorders. Method: RCTs involving acupuncture for anxiety disorders were identified from CBM, VIP, WANFANG Database, CNKI, PubMed, EMbase, and The Cochrane Library‥ All retrieval cut-off time was April 1, 2011, and meanwhile, the manual retrieval from Guangzhou University of traditional Chinese medicine library database was processed. report quality evaluation of the those included literature will be conducted with OCSI (Oregon CONSORT STRICTA Instrument) This will be a comparative study according to the year when the literatures were published and the score of each entry. Result 58 papers have been included. Between 1994 and 2011, the acupuncture treatment of anxiety disorder RCT report has been significantly increased, and the quality has been improved gradually. (P<0.001) However, there are 16 items whose mean scores <1.0 points (No 5,9,11,12,13,14,15,16,17, 18,19,21,24,25,26,27). Those 16 items account for 59.3% of the total number [95%CI (40.72%∼77.67%)]. Meanwhile, operator's background, diversity of result analysis method, the implementation methods of random sequence, allocation concealment, distribution sequences, setting blinding and evaluation the success of blinding implementation, the flow of participants through each stage quantitatively described and reasons of protocol deviations were relatively poorer. Conclusion The quality of those papers in acupuncture treatment for anxiety disorder research is generally low at present, In the future, application of international recognized CONSORT statement and STRICTA standard to regularize acupuncture clinical trials is recommended.