Comparisons of frequency of concealment of allocation, description of double blinding, adequate blinding of patients, trial size, type of intervention, funding, language of publication, and publication year were preplanned.
All of the studies were randomized, but the allocation description was generally not provided, with the exception of one paper, 21 in which the method of concealment had a real chance of disclosure of assignment prior to formal trial entry.
We evaluated trials for concealment of treatment allocation, clear description of the design, and completeness of follow-up.
23 The risk of bias was assessed in terms of the quality of random sequence generation and allocation concealment, description of dropouts and withdrawals, blinding (participants, personnel, and outcome assessment), and selective outcome reporting.
Special focus was given to the availability of information about randomization, blinding, allocation concealment, description of dropouts, utilization of an intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis, and source of funding.
We used method of randomisation, concealment of allocation, blinding, description of dropouts and withdrawals, intention to treat analysis, and duration of follow-up to assess the methodological quality of included randomised controlled trials.
Two reviewers (FP and JB) assessed the risk of bias of the interventional studies and used the categories randomization, random sequence generation allocation concealment, description of withdrawals and dropouts, the method of and use of intention-to-treat analysis, and standardization of important co-interventions.
Budget allocation involves descriptions concerning resource allocation in the HCS.
Two trials [ 13, 37] reported that random sequence was generated by a random number table, the remaining 25 trials only mentioned random allocation without any description about the method of randomization.
In Section 2, we introduce background including network configuration, MAC QoS, PHY resource allocation, and fairness descriptions.
They are methods of blinding, participant flow and recruitment (0%), implementation of randomization (7.14%), description of allocation concealment (14.29%), adverse events of acupuncture (21.43%) and outcomes of ancillary analyses (28.57%).
