Real and Fake Acupuncture May Relieve Breast Cancer Patients' Symptoms

How effective is acupuncture? It turns out that it may have some benefits for breast cancer patients. Scientists have discovered that both real and sham acupuncture treatments may help alleviate side effects of drugs commonly used to treat breast cancer. This could help improve care for cancer patients far into the future and also raises the question whether sham acupuncture is truly inert or may have beneficial effects.

Breast cancer patients who take a type of drug called an aromatase inhibitor, which inhibits the enzyme that produces estrogen in postmenopausal women, often experience side effects. These side effects can include joint and muscle pain and stiffness, and menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes. That's why researchers decided to see if acupuncture could help alleviate some of these symptoms.

The scientists recruited 47 breast cancer survivors taking aromatase inhibitors and suffering from joint/muscle discomfort. About half of the patients received eight weekly acupuncture treatments while the other half received a "sham" acupuncture that involved non-penetrating retractable needles placed in sham acupoints.

In the end, both of the groups experienced less of their symptoms--especially the hot flashes. However, there was little difference in benefits between the real acupuncture and the sham acupuncture. This, in particular, was surprising.

"It could be that there is no difference, or it could be that in this small trial we just didn't have enough patients to detect a significant difference," said Ting Bao, one of the researchers, in a news release.

That's not all the scientists found, either. They also discovered the women who were African American experienced a greater reduction in the severity and frequency of hot flashes if they had real acupuncture rather than sham acupuncture when compared to non-African American women. This, in particular, may open up future research possibilities.

"This kind of result is not definitive, but it does suggest that we should probably look further into the possibility that acupuncture may work better in some ethnicity groups than others," said Bao in a news release.

The findings are published in the journal Cancer.