Acupuncture shows promise for hot flashes

More interesting research showing the value of acupuncture treatment for hot flushes:


Acupuncture may offer women an alternative for easing hot flashes during menopause, preliminary research suggests.

In a study of 29 women with frequent, daily hot flashes, researchers found that those who received acupuncture began to have fewer and less severe symptoms during the night.
As nighttime hot flashes improved, so did the quality of the women's sleep, the researchers report in the journal Fertility & Sterility.

Hot flashes are a common part of menopause, and women who get them often have difficulty getting a good night's sleep. Hormone replacement therapy is effective at quelling hot flashes, but given the risks of the therapy -- including increased risks of heart disease and breast cancer -- many women are interested in alternative treatments.

The new findings offer preliminary evidence that acupuncture works, but it's too early to recommend the procedure for hot flashes, senior study author Dr. Rachel Manber told Reuters Health.

"Large replication studies are necessary before we move from bench to bed," said Manber, an associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine in California.
Recent medical research has found that acupuncture treatment may work by altering signals among nerve cells or by affecting the release of various chemicals of the central nervous system. There's also some evidence that acupuncture affects hormones related to both sleep and menopause.

However, for now, the mechanism by which acupuncture might affect hot flashes is not completely understood, Manber said.

For their study, she and her colleagues randomly assigned 29 women to receive seven weeks of acupuncture or a "sham" version of the procedure. In the latter case, acupuncturists used flat-tipped needles that did not pierce the skin, placing them on areas of the skin not considered to be acupuncture points. The patients could not see that the needles weren't piercing their skin.

By the end of treatment, women who'd been getting the real acupuncture sessions reported a greater reduction in the severity of their nighttime hot flashes than those in the comparison group.

Both groups said their hot flashes had become less frequent, the researchers found, and as hot flash symptoms improved, so did the women's sleep quality.

The sleep improvements were seen in both groups, and acupuncture itself did not seem to have a special effect on sleep. However, Manber pointed out, the acupuncture points used in the study were chosen because they target hot flash symptoms, according to traditional medicine. So the therapy was not designed to directly address sleep problems, she said.

By Amy Norton, NEW YORK (Reuters Health)

Acupuncture relieves low back pain over long-term, study says

By Patricia Reaney
REUTERS

11:33 a.m. September 14, 2006

LONDON – Acupuncture can be effective in treating patients with low back pain and the benefits seem to improve with time, according to research published on Friday.
The ancient Chinese treatment, which involves inserting fine needles at specific meridians of the body, is a popular complementary therapy for a variety of ailments. Hugh MacPherson and scientists at the University of York in England said the benefits of a short course of acupuncture were evident in their study of 241 back pain sufferers.

'If you offer acupuncture to someone with back pain on average it is expected you are likely to benefit, not just in the short term but particularly in the longer-term of 12 and especially 24 months,' he said in an interview.

'That's a remarkable finding in that normally you would expect the benefit of the treatment to wear off,' MacPherson added.

Low back pain is one of the most common medical complaints. It affects ten of millions of people and is a leading cause of sick days.

The researchers compared the impact of adding 10 acupuncture sessions over three months to the normal treatment for back pain, which includes medication, physiotherapy and exercises.
Patient satisfaction and pain levels were measured and recorded during the two-year study. After three months there was not too much difference between the acupuncture group and patients who had the standard therapy.

Weak evidence of improvement in the acupuncture group was found at 12 months, according to the study published in the British Medical Journal.

By 24 months the difference between the two groups increased.
'This is the first study to show this growing gap up to the two-year point. It is quite unique in that sense,' MacPherson added.

In a separate study in which they looked at the cost of acupuncture, the researchers found that the additional money spent on the acupuncture treatment appeared cost effective.
The cost of treating each patient in the acupuncture group was 460 pounds ($863) during the study, compared to 345 pounds ($647) for patients who received just the standard care.

Acupuncture can help treat effects of Parkinson's disease: Seoul professors

Acupuncture works in treating motor disorders caused by Parkinson's disease, a team of South Korean professors of Oriental medicine claimed Wednesday.

The team discovered that if the treatment is administered on the right side of patients' bodies with kinetic function disorders, it can help heal areas on the other side of their body.
The findings are "significant because acupuncture treatment can be employed as a preventive therapy for degenerative brain diseases, and it is also applicable to improving symptoms of Parkinson's patients," said Lim Sabina, a professor of Oriental medicine at Kyung Hee University who led the project.

The team was searching for "acupoints" on the bodies of Parkinson's patients first, then hoped to reveal how the treatment works after conducting brain mapping studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Lim said.

Acupuncture has traditionally been used as a form of healing in East Asian countries, including China, Korea and Japan. It works by piercing specific body parts with fine needles to relieve pain or produce a natural kind of local anaesthetic.

Seoul, Sept. 13 (Yonhap News)