Insights & Discussion
Acupuncture has been shown to be more effective than vitamin B treatment in terms of clinical efficacy rate for chemotherapy induced peripheral neuropathy.
Aside from 1 study using sham-EA as a control group, all 12 studies included acupuncture versus pharmacological treatments. The results showed that acupuncture could show a superior clinical efficacy than vitamin B therapy. However, the methodological quality of the involved studies was generally low.
Discover Related Insights
Compared with usual care, acupuncture resulted in significant improvement in chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy symptoms.
2020 JAMA Oncology Effect of Acupuncture vs Sham Procedure on Chemotherapy-Induced Peripheral Neuropathy Symptoms A Randomized Clinical Trial Bao T, Patil S, Chen C, et al.
Randomised Controlled Trial Chemotherapy Chemotherapy-Induced Peripheral Neuropathy
We found therapeutic benefit of real acupuncture for neuropathic pain that is consistent with previous pilot acupuncture CIPN trials. Distinctively, our study is the first, to our knowledge, to incorporate a sham treatment and a nontreatment control to evaluate the efficacy of acupuncture for CIPN.
The addition of a sham acupuncture control in an acupuncture clinical trial is difficult owing to the challenge of incorporating a truly inert placebo. In addition, a sham control limits the ability of a small effect size to elucidate a true difference between real and sham acupuncture.
Not only did our study demonstrate the feasibility of conducting a sham-controlled acupuncture trial, it generated sufficient pilot data to inform a definitive sham-controlled efficacy trial. Our trial is limited by its small sample size, single center, and short-term follow-up.