Acupuncture for Patients With Chronic Tension-Type Headache

Abstract

Background and Objectives:Whether acupuncture is effective for chronic tension-type headache (CTTH) is inconclusive. We aimed to examine the effectiveness of acupuncture with a follow-up period of 32 weeks.Methods:We conducted a randomized controlled trial, and 218 participants who were diagnosed with CTTH were recruited from June 2017 to September 2020. The participants in the intervention group received 20 sessions of true acupuncture (TA group) over 8 weeks. The acupuncture treatments were standardized across participants, and each acupuncture site was needled to achieve deqi sensation. Each treatment session lasted 30 minutes. The participants in the control group received the same sessions and treatment frequency of superficial acupuncture (SA group)—defined as a type of sham control by avoiding deqi sensation at each acupuncture site. The main outcome was the responder rate at 16 weeks after randomization (week 16) and was followed up at week 32. A responder was defined as a participant who reported at least a 50% reduction in the monthly number of headache days (MHDs).Results:Our study included 218 participants (mean age: 43.1 years, mean disease duration: 130 months, MHDs: 21.5 days). The responder rate was 68.2% in the TA group (n=110) versus 48.1% in the SA group (n=108) at week 16 (odds ratio, 2.65; 95%CI, 1.5 to 4.77; p<0.001); and it was 68.2% in the TA group versus 50% in the SA group at week 32 (odds ratio, 2.4; 95%CI, 1.36 to 4.3; p<0.001). The reduction in MHDs was 13.1±9.8 days in the TA group versus 8.8±9.6 days in the SA group at week 16 (mean difference, 4.3 days; 95%CI, 2.0 to 6.5; p<0.001), and the reduction was 14±10.5 days in the TA group versus 9.5±9.3 days in the SA group at week 32 (mean difference, 4.5 days; 95%CI, 2.1 to 6.8; p<0.001). Four mild adverse events were reported; three in the TA group versus one in the SA group.Conclusion:The 8-week TA treatment was effective for the prophylaxis of CTTH. Further studies might focus on the cost-effectiveness of the treatment.TrialRegistration Information: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT03133884 (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03133884)Classification of Evidence:This study provides Class I evidence that acupuncture (achieving deqi sensation) reduces mean headache days (per month) in patients with chronic tension-type headache.

Acupuncture for tension-type headache: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

“…Through reading full texts, 26 studies were excluded, and the reasons for exclusion are listed in Appendix 2 . We included an article ( 47 ) as a supplement to Zhang ( 34 ), a total of 30 RCTs ( 21 – 23 , 27 – 36 , 48 – 64 ) involving 2,742 participants were included (1,349 in the intervention group and 1,393 in the control group) ( Figure 1 ).…”

“…Melchart and his colleagues concluded that manual acupuncture was better than no treatment in reducing headache frequency of TTH ( 22 ). Zheng et al reported that 8-week acupuncture treatment was effective to alleviate pain intensity in patients with chronic TTH ( 23 ). However, previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses of acupuncture for TTH hold inconsistent results ( 20 , 24 – 26 ).…”

“…However, previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses of acupuncture for TTH hold inconsistent results ( 20 , 24 – 26 ). In addition, several randomized controlled trials ( RCTs) have been carried out in recent years ( 23 , 27 – 36 ). Therefore, we conducted this systematic review and meta-analysis to update the evidence of the effect and safety of acupuncture for TTH.…”

Research advances on AI-powered thermal management for data centers

“…Despite that significant progress has been made in the field of semantic segmentation [6,7,33,50,53,55,58,60,62], most existing methods focus on the closed-set setting in which dense prediction is performed on the same set of categories in training and testing time. Thus, methods that are trained and perform well in the closed-set setting may fail when applied to the open world, as pixels of unseen objects in the open world are likely to be assigned categories that are seen during training, causing catastrophic consequences in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving [63]. Straightforward solutions include fine-tuning or retraining the existing neural networks, but it is impractical to enumerate unlimited unseen categories during retraining, let along large quantities of time and efforts needed.…”

Acupuncture Treatment for Chronic Tension-Type Headache

“…In the study "Acupuncture for Patients With Chronic Tension-Type Headache: A Randomized Controlled Trial," Zheng et al looked at how well acupuncture worked for people with chronic tension-type headaches (TTHs). 1 How Was This Study Done?…”