Now, new research suggests that acupuncture may also help lung cancer patients with dyspnea, also known as shortness of breath, a common condition with few effective treatment options.
“This is a major problem for lung cancer patients,” said Joshua Bauml, MD, assistant professor of hematology/oncology, who led a pilot study to investigate the feasibility of the technique in patients. “Even mild shortness of breath has a significant impact on patients’ quality of life. »
“It affects the way they walk, talk and live,” he added. Nearly 90 percent of lung cancer patients experience dyspnea, which is also very common in COPD patients. However, clinicians treat shortness of breath in lung cancer much less aggressively than in COPD — and it is studied much less in cancer patients, Bauml said.
In the study of 12 patients, published last week in the newspaper Integrative Cancer TherapiesBauml and colleagues from Hematology/Oncology and ACC Integrative Oncology Group showed that acupuncture led to significant improvement in shortness of breath, quality of life and fatigue.
Although not fully understood, the mechanism of acupuncture for treating pain and distress symptoms may involve helping the brain release neurochemicals, such as endorphins, and regulating the autonomic nervous system. .
The needles are very thin and most people feel little or no pain when they are inserted into “acupuncture points” on the body. There are several hundred of them distributed all over the body. For a closer look, check out this body diagram.
In the dyspnea study, needles were first placed in the chest area and then in the patients’ backs by two ACC-licensed acupuncturists for 15 to 20 minutes. Numerical scores for dyspnea were then recorded in patients for seven days after each treatment and four weeks after their last treatment, from 0 (no shortness of breath) to 10 (most severe shortness of breath imaginable).
Patients who underwent 10 sessions of acupuncture showed a 50 percent reduction in disease severity: the average dyspnea severity score before treatment was 6.3, at the end of treatment it was 3.6 and 3.2 four weeks after treatment. Their overall quality of life scores also improved and most reported feeling less tired.
The study, funded by the American Cancer Society and including the lead author Jun J. Mao, MD, MSCEformerly of ACC, now at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Andrew Haas, MD, PhD, Charles B. Simone, MD, Susan Q. Li, MS, Roger B. Cohenall from Penn, is the latest on acupuncture from the ACC Integrative Oncology Task Force.
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology last year showed that acupuncture may be a viable treatment for women experiencing hot flashes following estrogen-targeted therapies to treat breast cancer. This trial, led by Mao, involved 120 breast cancer survivors. After an eight-week treatment period, subjects in the electroacupuncture group showed the greatest improvement in a standard measure of hot flash frequency and severity, compared to those who received “sham” acupuncture, when needles are placed in areas not identified as acupuncture points. .
Acupuncture is available for patients at the ACC since 2014. They also have access to yoga, reiki and mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy.
Although the dyspnea trial was a preliminary study, it was a promising study that surprised researchers.
“It is difficult to improve any of these variables in lung cancer patients, so it is even more impressive that we saw significant improvement in all three of these variables in this small study.” , Bauml said. “The next step would be to confirm these results in a larger randomized study. »
