ArticlePain research & management2026
Dry Needling Versus Manual Therapy for Mechanical Neck Pain: A Target Trial Emulation Using Electronic Health Records.
Article in Pain research & management, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Dry Needling Versus Manual Therapy for Mechanical Neck Pain: A Target Trial Emulation Using Electronic Health Records.Pain research & management · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveTo estimate the effect of dry needling versus manual therapy on disability in mechanical neck pain by emulating a target trial using electronic health record data from three tertiary hospitals in China.
designThis target trial emulation used a new-user, active-comparator design with alignment at time zero. Patients were new users of dry needling plus exercise (n = 1995) or manual therapy plus exercise (n = 3898). The primary outcome was the Neck Disability Index (NDI) at 3 months. Effects were estimated by inverse probability of treatment weighting (intention-to-treat-analogue) and clone-censor-weighting (per-protocol).
resultsAmong 5893 patients, dry needling initiators were more severe at baseline (maximum standardised mean difference, 0.72), consistent with confounding by indication. The unadjusted 3-month NDI difference (dry needling minus manual therapy) was 10.1 points (95% CI, 9.4-10.7). After weighting, the difference was 5.7 points (95% CI, 5.0-6.5), exceeding the minimal clinically important difference of 5.5. The per-protocol difference was 5.7 (95% CI, 4.9-6.4).
conclusionUnder the assumptions of the target trial emulation, manual therapy was associated with greater improvement in disability than dry needling, consistent with the index trial. The unadjusted analysis overstated the association, underlining the value of confounding adjustment. Residual confounding from unmeasured factors cannot be excluded.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.