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A randomized, controlled, double-blind study of more than 350 pregnant women found that acupuncture or the use of doxylamine pyridoxine reduced moderate to severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. Even greater relief was obtained using both treatments. This study Annual report of internal medicine.
Nausea and vomiting affect up to 85% of pregnant women. 80-90% of these cases are mild, but severe nausea and vomiting, or hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), occurs in 10% of cases. Furthermore, up to 10 percent of desired pregnancies complicated by HG are aborted due to intolerable symptoms or complications.
Despite the need for effective treatment and reluctance to take medications in pregnant women, insufficient sample size and poor quality of studies make few recommendations regarding optimal treatment alternatives possible.
Researchers at the First Affiliated Hospital of Heilongjiang University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Heilongjiang Provincial Hospital in Harbin, China, treated 352 women in early pregnancy with moderate to severe nausea and vomiting with 30 minutes of active or sham acupuncture each day. Patients were randomly assigned to receive treatment and/or doxylamine pyridoxine. or a placebo for 14 days to assess the efficacy and safety of the intervention or a combination of both.
The authors found that active acupuncture and doxylamine-pyridoxine were slightly better than sham acupuncture and placebo, respectively, in reducing severe symptoms and improving quality of life in pregnant women. did. However, combining both treatments resulted in numerically greater benefits than each treatment alone.
The authors note that antiemetics may be underprescribed by general practitioners due to concerns about the potential risk of birth defects. Acupuncture may serve as an alternative for patients who do not want to use medications during pregnancy.
