Abstract
In the neck meridian test, the examinee stretches his or her neck in four directions and rates the intensity of pain and/or symptoms on a four point Likert scale. The four responses are summed to calculate the test score. This study conducted secondary analyses of data from a randomized controlled trial of self-administered acupressure. The study aimed to examine the change of the neck meridian test score induced by self-administered acupressure. The data of 54 (male, n = 34; female, n = 20) students, who were randomly assigned to an intervention group (IG) and a control group (CG), were subjected to secondary analyses. The IG participants were asked to complete a self-administered acupressure intervention for two weeks; the CG participants were not. In the IG, the perceived stress decreased significantly over time, while the neck meridian test score decreased significantly; in contrast, this score increased in the CG. A significant positive correlation was found between the changes in the perceived stress and neck meridian test scores. These results supported validity of the neck meridian test as a tool for assessing perceived stress.
Highlights
The development of a reliable and valid tool for assessing perceived stress in the fields of acupuncture and moxibustion medicine would provide a potentially useful assessment tool for both researchers and practitioners to apply when using these methods to manage stress [1]
The following hypotheses were established and tested: 1) the score of the neck meridian test would significantly decrease in the intervention group (IG), while it would not change in the control group (CG); and 2) a positive and significant correlation would be found between the changes in the scores of the neck meridian test and
Subsequent analyses of the interaction effect indicated that the tension arousal (TA) score decreased significantly over time in the IG (12.0 ± 4.35 to 9.3 ± 3.21) while it did not change in the CG (11.7 ± 3.89 to 12.7 ± 4.38)
Summary
The development of a reliable and valid tool for assessing perceived stress in the fields of acupuncture and moxibustion medicine would provide a potentially useful assessment tool for both researchers and practitioners to apply when using these methods to manage stress [1]. One fifth of users of these methods in Japan undergo treatment to manage stress [2] It is common, for researchers and practitioners to use psychological (e.g., questionnaires) and physiological measures (e.g., heart rate variability) to assess their results [1], due to the lack of such a tool. Tsuda, & Horiuchi [1] [3] proposed the neck meridian test as a tool that can be applied in the assessment of perceived stress. This test is a simplified version of the meridian test [4]. In the neck meridian test, the examinee is asked to stretch his or her neck in four directions and to rate the intensity of pain and symptoms that he or she feels during the stretch on a four-point Likert scale
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