Can acupuncture alleviate allergies?

Researchers, publishing in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that 71 percent of people reported an improvement in their allergies after eight weeks of acupuncture.

But so did 56 percent of allergy sufferers who were treated with sham acupuncture as a comparison.

“Acupuncture led to statistically significant improvements in disease-specific quality of life an antihistamine use measures after eight weeks of treatment compared with sham acupuncture and with (medication) along,” wrote lead researcher Benno Brinkhaus and colleagues. “But the improvements may not be clinically significant.”

Brinkhaus, at Charite-University Medical Center in Berlin, and his colleagues randomly assigned 422 people with seasonal allergies to receive real or sham acupuncture or to take only antihistamines as needed.

After eight weeks and 12 treatment sessions, average allergy symptom scores dropped among people in the acupuncture group from 2.7 to 1.7 points on a 0-to-6 scale, where lower scores indicate fewer symptoms.

Among patients treated with sham acupuncture, symptom scores improved from 2.3 to 1.8 point, and from 2.5 to 2.2 in the medication only group.

However, by another eight weeks after the treatment ended, there was no longer any difference in the degree of symptom improvement between groups.

People with allergies would likely notice about a half-point change on the symptom scale in their daily lives, the researchers said — the difference between the real and sham acupuncture groups after eight weeks in the current study.

“It works, but there are some caveats (for) people who might think of using it,” said Harold Nelson, who treats allergies at National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado and was not part of the study.

“This is pretty invasive, particularly when you compare it to something like spraying a nasal steroid in your nose once a morning,” he added. It is also more time consuming and requires finding a qualified, licensed acupuncture's.

Researchers aren't sure why acupuncture might help people with seasonal allergies, other than its possible beneficial effect on the immune system.

Nelson said antihistamines might not have been the best drug comparison for acupuncture, since daily use of nasal steroids is better at preventing symptoms.

For people with allergies, “I would suggest they use conventional medication on a daily basis, and I certainly prefer nasal steroids over antihistamines,” he said.

But medication doesn't work perfectly for everyone, the researchers pointed out.

“We mostly saw patients in our outpatient practice who have had this disease for years,” Brinkhaus told Reuters Health. “They are not very happy taking the medications every day, and some of them suffer from side effects of medications.”

For those people, acupuncture could be a good add-on option, said Brinkhaus, an acupuncturist and internal medicine doctor.

“It's not an alternative. We use it firstly as some sort of complementary medicine. If the acupuncture has good results, we can reduce the anti-allergic medication,” he said.

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