Acupuncture May Relieve Menstrual Cramps (135 hits)
HONG KONG (Reuters) Feb 18 - Acupuncture may help relieve menstrual cramps, which affect up to half of all young women, a systematic literature review has found.
In their analysis of 27 studies involving nearly 3,000 women, researchers from the Oriental Hospital at Kyung Hee University Medical Center in South Korea found that acupuncture may be more effective than drugs or herbal medicines.
"There is convincing evidence on the effectiveness of using acupuncture to treat pain as it stimulates the production of endorphins and serotonin in the central nervous system," they wrote in a statement.
"Compared with pharmacological treatment or herbal medicine, acupuncture was associated with a significant reduction in pain," they added in their paper, which appeared online February 17 in BJOG.
The authors, led by Dr. S-H Cho, systematically searched 19 electronic databases, including English, Korean, Japanese and Chinese databases, for randomized controlled trials of acupuncture for primary dysmenorrhea.
But, the researchers said, "the results were limited by methodological flaws." For example, only nine of the 27 trials clearly reported their methods of randomization, and none explained how allocation was concealed.
"Further rigorous nonpenetrating placebo-controlled (randomized trials) are warranted," the authors concluded.
