SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Researchers working under a study designed in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that acupuncture provides significantly more relief of osteoarthritis knee pain than conventional interventions.
In a press briefing given at the 2004 annual scientific meeting of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), Marc Hochberg, MD, Professor of Medicine and Head of Rheumatology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, said that the study was the latest to emerge from 13 years of research and prior trials in which the benefits of acupuncture in the relief of pain were observed.
Patients receiving actual acupuncture treatment began achieving significant pain relief 14 weeks into the study, with increasing relief as the patients underwent 23 acupuncture sessions. Overall, the actual acupuncture treatment achieved notable improvement in function (P = 0.01), in pain (P = 0.003), and in global patient improvement (P = 0.02) when compared with a sham procedure.
According to Dr. Hochberg, the differences between the actual acupuncture procedure and traditional therapy were even more significant, but he withheld those figures pending publication of the manuscript.
"These results allow us to conclude that traditional Chinese acupuncture is an effective intervention for the relief of pain and improvement of function when used as an adjunctive treatment for people with osteoarthritis of the knee who still have moderate or greater pain despite being on background therapy of antiinflammatory drugs," he said.
Funded and under the aegis of the NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the large clinical trial consisted of 570 patients who were taking antiinflammatory medicine for relief of osteoarthritis of the knee but still experiencing pain. The patients were randomly assigned to three treatment groups. One group of 190 patients received traditional Chinese acupuncture, involving the placement of 9 needles around the knees and elsewhere on the body. A second group consisting of patients naÑ—ve to acupuncture procedures was treated with "sham" acupuncture; instead of the needles being inserted into the skin, they were taped onto the skin. The third group received educational intervention based on the widely used work of Kate Lorig, RN, DrPh, of Stanford University in Stanford, Calif.
Dr. Hochberg said that both the sham treatment and the actual Chinese acupuncture showed significant improvement in pain over the traditional intervention. In turn, the traditional Chinese acupuncture was notably superior to the sham procedure, providing significant improvement in function after 8 weeks with ongoing improvement over the course of the 26-week study.
"I think that these sorts of studies will increase interest in acupuncture and other modalities of treatment," said Joseph Flood, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Ohio State University, Columbus, who moderated the press briefing on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology. "I think we will need more studies before we see how it will fit into the clinical treatment of people with osteoarthritis. I think these are interesting insights that are scientifically validated now, which makes a good deal of difference to us," he told CiaoMed.