Asthma is a worldwide health problem. Both developed and developing countries are suffering from this respiratory inflammatory condition and in spite of highly professional guidelines for asthma such as GINA, the prevalence of asthma is not going down yet. Recently, more and more asthmatic patients are being interested in complementary and alternative medicine such as herbal medicine, acupuncture, yoga, and etc. However the evidence of these interventions is not yet well established. Recently one acupuncture clinical trial showed some promising results 1. In this trial symptomatic patients of asthma who were already under the management of conventional medications such as corticosteroid inhaler, participated and were allowed to maintain their medications during the study. Patients received either real acupuncture treatment or sham acupuncture treatment each three times weekly for 4 weeks. Another group (waitlist group) of participants received no acupuncture treatment for six weeks. Pulmonary function, asthma-specific quality of life questionnaire and dyspnea symptom questionnaire were evaluated at baseline and after 2, 4, 6 weeks in every participants.
Although there was no effect of acupuncture on pulmonary function in the between- or within-group comparision, real acupuncture yielded the improvement of quality of life and dyspnea symptoms which are both statistically and clinically significant from baseline and these improvement changes are significantly better than the waitlist group. Sham acupuncture also showed some improvement in the quality of life and dyspnea, but these changes are not clinically significant.
Doctor Jun-Yong Choi, the first author of this study1 says "Anyone who is suffering from asthma symptoms despite of the conventional medications can have benefits of better quality of life and symptom improvement from acupuncture treatment.
1. Choi J-Y, Jung H-J, Kim J-I, et al. A randomized pilot study of acupuncture as an adjunct therapy in adult asthmatic patients. The Journal of asthma official journal of the Association for the Care of Asthma. 2010;47(7):774-780.
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