Does Acupuncture Help Improve IVF Pregnancy Success Rates?

Acupuncture, if used with in vitro fertilization (IVF),can help women become pregnant, a latest study reveals.

The researchers analyzed 16 separate studies of over 4000 women and found that acupuncture helped increase the pregnancy chances among women with below-average IVF pregnancy success rates.

"The lower the baseline pregnancy rate at the clinic, the more adjuvant acupuncture seemed to increase the pregnancy rate," said Dr. Eric Manheimer, lead author and research associate at the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine.

Acupuncture is a technique that involves inserting needles in to the skin to stimulate specific points in the body. In vitro fertilization is a procedure wherein a woman's eggs are fertilized with sperm in a laboratory and the embryo is later implanted in the woman's uterus. Complementary therapies such as acupuncture, yoga and hypnosis are done to increase the pregnancy chances, LiveScience reported.

In the U.S. the pregnancy success rates among women using IVF aged between 35 and 40 remained as low as 35 percent and just 20 percent among women older than 40 years of age, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention statistics revealed. Each IVF attempt costs more than $10,000.

Use of acupuncture along with IVF has over time given mixed results. 

A 2002 German study found that pregnancy success among women who did acupuncture along with IVF treatment doubled compared to those with only IVF. Their follow-up study a year later compared fake and real acupuncture procedures with IVF. They found that both groups had the same conception results. This showed that acupuncture's role in a successful pregnancy could be because of placebo effect, reported LiveScience.

Another study in 2006, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, showed mixed results of the effect of acupuncture with IVF. In 2008, Manheimer published a report supporting acupuncture during IVF. But a follow-up study with co-authors from China, the U.K. and the Netherlands, found that on average acupuncture did not show significant improvement in pregnancy success rates in the 4000 cases they studied.