STRICTA - STandards for Reporting Interventions in Clinical Trials of Acupuncture

STRICTA has been designed to improve the Standards for Reporting Interventions in Clinical Trials of Acupuncture. These guidelines provide authors a way to structure their reports of interventions with a minimum set of items within a checklist. This will facilitate transparency in published reports, enabling a better understanding and interpretation of results, aiding their critical appraisal, and providing detail that is necessary for replication. 

These guidelines are a revised version of what was originally published in 2001. The new version has been developed in conjunction with the CONSORT Group Executive, such that the new version of STRICTA has become an official extension to the CONSORT Statement. Involved in the revision process have been a wide range of acupuncturists, physicians, clinical trialists, methodologists, guideline developers and journals editors from around the world.  STRICTA is published and endorsed by twelve journals, and translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian.

Translation into Portuguese will follow soon. STRICTA can be viewed and freely downloaded from the website at www.stricta.info/. The core content of the STRICTA guidelines consists of a checklist of six key items, with each item within the checklist having an explanation and a series of examples of good reporting.  

The publication of the revised STRICTA guidelines in 2010 makes the previous version, first published 2001 and 2002, out-dated. Users of STRICTA should use the 2010 version when reporting clinical trials or interpreting published reports. 

A recent review of STRICTA provides some evdience that STRICTA can be credited in part with an improvement in the quality of reporting.(Svenkerud & MacPherson 2018) [Open Access]

More details on the STRICTA website: www.stricta.info/ 

Key publication:

MacPherson H, Altman DG, Hammerschlag R, Youping L, Taixiang W, White A, Moher D. Revised STandards for Reporting Interventions in Clinical Trials of Acupuncture (STRICTA): Extending the CONSORT Statement. PLoS Med 2010; 7(6)  [Full text]

Other publications:

Svenkerud S, MacPherson H. The impact of STRICTA and CONSORT on reporting randomised controlled trials of acupuncture: a systematic methodological evlauation. Acupunct Med 2018;36:349–357. [Open Access]

MacPherson H, Altman DG. Improving the quality of reporting acupuncture interventions: describing the collaboration between STRICTA, CONSORT  and the Chinese Cochrane Centre. Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine.
2009; 2:  1-4. [Full  text] 

Prady SL,  Richmond SJ,  Morton VM, MacPherson H.A Systematic  Evaluation of the Impact of STRICTA and CONSORT Recommendations on Quality of  Reporting for Acupuncture Trials. PLoS ONE 2008;3(2):e1577 [Full text] 

Prady SL, MacPherson H. Assessing the Utility of the Standards for Reporting Trials of Acupuncture (STRICTA): A Survey of Authors. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 2007, 13(9): 939-944.