Migraines: Electro acupuncture helps

Larissa Melville completed her traineeship in the editorial team of . After studying biology at Ludwig Maximilians University and the Technical University of Munich, she first got to know digital media online at Focus and then decided to learn medical journalism from scratch.

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Migraine attacks are often extremely stressful. Medication can reduce the intensity and frequency of seizures, but cannot prevent them entirely. But there is a gentle procedure from which the patients also benefit: electro acupuncture.

Fine acupuncture needles are connected to a low-voltage electrical device. By placing the needles on the acupuncture points, disturbances and blockages in the flow of energy should be removed, which are considered to be the cause of diseases in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

With electric needles against the pain

Ling Zhao and his colleagues from the University of TCM in Chengdu, China, studied how well electroacupuncture works for migraines.

A total of 245 patients aged 18 to 65 years took part in the study. On average, the subjects suffered from 4.9 migraine attacks per month.

For the study, the researchers divided the participants into three groups. The first two received electroacupuncture on five days over a period of four weeks. However, the needles were only placed at the correct acupuncture points in one group of participants. The second group only received a sham treatment in which the needles were placed in different skin areas. There was also a control group that was not acupunctured.

Less pain attacks

The result: In the group with correctly performed acupuncture, the migraine attacks were reduced by 3.2 per month in the following 16 weeks - on average, the participants only had 1.7 attacks.

The sham acupuncture also had an effect - however, the number of seizures only decreased by 2.1. In the control group, the number of attacks decreased by only 1.4 per month.

In addition, the severity of the attacks decreased the most in the group in which the needles were inserted correctly. The amount of pain medication that the participants took was nevertheless the same in all groups.

Massive restriction

Migraines manifest themselves as a recurring, pulsating, pounding or boring headache that usually only affects one side. The attacks are accompanied by symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, or visual disturbances. A severe migraine severely restricts those affected in their everyday activities.

The causes of the pain disorder are not yet known. Various factors are discussed, including an imbalance of the messenger substance serotonin, which could trigger a deficient blood flow in certain areas of the brain.

Source: Ling Zhao et al .: The Long-term Effect of Acupuncture for Migraine Prophylaxis. A Randomized Clinical Trial. Jama Internal Medicine. doi: 10.1001 / jamainternmed.2016.9378

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