Can Acupuncture Improve Odds of Conceiving a Baby?
(2/8, Marchione) reports that according to findings published in today’s issue of BMJ, “acupuncture might improve the odds of conceiving if done right before or after embryos are placed in the womb.” Lead author Eric Manheimer, M.S., a researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and colleagues, conducted a meta-analysis of “results from seven studies on 1,366 women in the United States, Germany, Australia, and Denmark who are having in vitro fertilization, or IVF.” Participants “were randomly assigned to receive IVF alone, IVF with acupuncture within a day of embryo transfer, or IVF plus sham acupuncture, in which needles were placed too shallowly, or in spots not thought to matter.” The revealed that “three of the studies [considered] acupuncture beneficial,” another “three found a trend toward benefit, and one found no benefit.”
By combining the study results, the researchers discovered “a 65 percent increase in pregnancy, and an 87 percent increase in the continuity of the pregnancy,” AHN (2/8, Duerme) adds. The results also showed a “ninety-one percent increase” in live births.
The analysis indicated that “in studies where pregnancy rates were high, the benefit of acupuncture was small and non-significant,” HealthDay (2/8, Reinberg) reports. Manheimer noted that while “[a]cupuncture may be useful adjuvant treatment in the IVF process,” he believes “there needs to be more studies to confirm these findings, because they are still preliminary.”
Nevertheless, the authors concluded that even if the likelihood of success with acupuncture were small, “an acupuncture cointervention may still be cost effective, considering the negligible costs of two to four sessions of acupuncture, relative to the high costs of in vitro fertilization,” Medscape (2/8, Barclay) adds.
The BBC (2/8) reports that Professor Edzard Ernst, Ph.D., a leading researcher into alternative treatments from the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, England, advised caution regarding the findings, because “much of the observed effect could be due to a placebo response,” he said.
