Acupuncture provides benefits to patients with asthma

Receiving acupuncture treatment along with routine care was associated with increased health-related and disease-specific quality of life compared with routine care alone in patients with allergic asthma, according to research recently published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

“Several studies in the last 2 decades that evaluated the efficacy of acupuncture in the treatment of asthma have been inconclusive. More research in this area has been encouraged,” Benno Brinkhaus, MD, professor of internal medicine and clinical epidemiology, Institute for Social Medicine, Epidemiology and Health Economics, Charite´ Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany, and colleagues wrote. “Additionally, most trials compared acupuncture with sham acupuncture to further investigate the specific benefit.”

To gather more data, Brinkhaus and colleagues assessed 1,445 patients with allergic asthma who received acupuncture treatment or routine care alone. A total of 184 patients were assigned to receive 15 acupuncture sessions over 3 months and 173 patients were ass