Acupuncture doesn’t improve IVF success rate, study confirms
By Jen Gunter, IJ correspondentMarinji.com/Posted: 05/27/18
There are approximately 200,000 cycles of in vitro fertilization (IVF) for infertility every year in the United States. This is an incredible investment, both financial and emotional. Women must undergo a significant amount of invasive testing to see if they are even a candidate and then the IVF requires days of hormone injections, blood work, numerous ultrasounds and two procedures — one to retrieve the eggs and another to hopefully implant an embryo. And then the terrible waiting to see if it worked.
The average cost per cycle of IVF is $12,400, even higher for cycles where a donor egg is required or if a gestational surrogate is used, and success is not guaranteed. For a woman under the age of 35 the chance of having a live birth with IVF using her own eggs is approximately 56 percent, but the success drops significantly for women aged 35 and older. By the time a woman is 38 her chance of a successful pregnancy with IVF is about 30 percent and over the age of 42 it drops to 5.0 percent.
To improve the chances of success with IVF many people turn to acupuncture. According to the internet acupuncture can “boost” (whatever that means) IVF and improving the chances of taking a baby home. That sounds good, except that’s not quite what the science shows.
Until now much of the data on acupuncture and IVF has been inconclusive, primarily because the studies are of such low quality. Acupuncture studies are notoriously poor in design, making them difficult to interpret and the studies for IVF are no exception. Some low-quality studies have shown a mild positive impact, but other studies have shown no benefit. One study even had better outcomes with the sham, or placebo, procedure than the acupuncture itself!
A new study published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) is a good answer to any unresolved issues surrounding acupuncture and IVF. It is a well-designed clinical trial from researchers in Australia and New Zealand. The investigators enrolled more than 800 women with an average age of 35 years who were seeking IVF for infertility. The women were randomized to traditional Chinese acupuncture by experienced practitioners all trained to provide the treatment protocol or to sham acupuncture (placebo). This study is the highest quality clinical trial that we can do in medicine as the patients, the infertility specialists, the nurses and the study coordinators were all blinded as to who received which therapy. No one except the acupuncturist knew who had acupuncture and who had the placebo treatment.
The results? The live birth rate for the acupuncture group was 18.3 percent and 17.8 percent for the sham acupuncture group, so no difference.
The results are not surprising. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine summarized the data on acupuncture and IVF in 2017 and its guidelines state that the evidence is “fair” that acupuncture does not improve live births with IVF. This recent high-quality study adds further evidence that acupuncture is ineffective.
It is understandable that people want to optimize their outcomes with IVF, however, the data shows that acupuncture is not the way to improve a woman’s chances of taking a baby home. Based on this new data acupuncture for IVF should be limited to patients enrolled in clinical studies.
Suggesting that people who are desperate for success pay for acupuncture in addition to their already expensive IVF given the results of this study and the bulk of the data already available just doesn’t seem right. Whether doctors and acupuncturists who profit from acupuncture for IVF stop selling this false hope remains to be seen.
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