Effects of acupuncture on rates of pregnancy and live birth among women undergoing in vitro fertilization: systematic review and metaanalysis. Manheimer E et al. BMJ 2008;336 pg 545-549 British Medical Journal Early in 2008, the prestigious British Medical journal published its own analysis of the acupuncture in a meta-analysis of 7 of these trials; i.e. they chose only those which met strict research criteria.
The authors concluded, ―The odds ratio of 1.65 suggests that acupuncture increased the odds of clinical pregnancy by 65% compared with the control groups… In absolute terms 10 patients would need to be treated with acupuncture to bring about one additional clinical pregnancy.
These are clinically relevant benefits.‖ And when they analyzed the 4 trials that measured live births in addition to pregnancy rates, they found that acupuncture increased the odds by 91% and that the number of patients who would need to be treated to bring about an additional pregnancy dropped to 9. Impressive as these results are they may still be an underestimate, since the authors included women whose IVF cycles were cancelled before transfer.
The accompanying editorial in the BMJ makes the comment that adding acupuncture to IVF improved pregnancy rates more than any other recent improvement or advance in IVF technology. Abstract Objective - To evaluate whether acupuncture improves rates of pregnancy and live birth when used as an adjuvant treatment to embryo transfer in women undergoing in vitro fertilization. Design - Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data sources - Medline, Cochrane Central, Embase,
Chinese Biomedical Database, hand searched abstracts, and reference lists. Review methods - Eligible studies were randomized controlled trials that compared needle acupuncture administered within one day of embryo transfer with sham acupuncture or no adjuvant treatment, with reported outcomes of at least one of clinical pregnancy, ongoing pregnancy, or live birth. Two reviewers independently agreed on eligibility; assessed methodological quality; and extracted outcome data.
For all trials, investigators contributed 6 additional data not included in the original publication (such as live births). Meta-analyses included all randomized patients. Data synthesis - Seven trials with 1366 women undergoing in vitro fertilization were included in the meta-analyses.
There was little clinical heterogeneity. Trials with sham acupuncture and no adjuvant treatment as controls were pooled for the primary analysis.
Complementing the embryo transfer process with acupuncture was associated with significant and clinically relevant improvements in clinical pregnancy (odds ratio 1.65, 95% confidence interval 1.27 to 2.14; number needed to treat (NNT) 10 (7 to 17); seven trials), ongoing pregnancy (1.87, 1.40 to 2.49; NNT 9 (6 to 15); five trials), and live birth (1.91, 1.39 to 2.64; NNT 9 (6 to 17); four trials).
Because we were unable to obtain outcome data on live births for three of the included trials, the pooled odds ratio for clinical pregnancy more accurately represents the true combined effect from these trials rather than the odds ratio for live birth. The results were robust to sensitivity analyses on study validity variables. A prespecified subgroup analysis restricted to the three trials with the higher rates of clinical pregnancy in the control group, however, suggested a smaller non-significant benefit of acupuncture (odds ratio 1.24, 0.86 to 1.77). Conclusions -
Current preliminary evidence suggests that acupuncture given with embryo transfer improves rates of pregnancy and live birth among women undergoing in vitro fertilization.