For people with migraine without aura [vision problems], regular acupuncture may help reduce the frequency of attacks, hints a study from China.

Patients with migraine without aura who received five acupuncture treatments per week for four consecutive weeks had about one less headache per month than similar patients who got the same number of sham acupuncture treatments, researchers report.

“Acupuncture should be considered as one option for migraine prophylaxis in light of our findings,” they write in Jama Internal Medicine.

Acupuncture is commonly used to treat migraine headache in China, however, studies of whether it works for migraine prevention have been inconsistent, the study team notes.

Ling Zhao of Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Sichuan, China, and colleagues recruited 249 adults who had an average of two to eight migraines without aura per month from three clinical centres in China.

Acupuncture is commonly used to treat migraine headache in China, however, studies of whether it works for migraine prevention have been inconsistent

For the study, participants kept track of their migraine headache frequency and severity for four weeks before being randomly assigned to receive true acupuncture treatment, sham acupuncture treatment or to be put on a waiting list for treatment.

People in both the true and sham acupuncture groups received 20 treatments with acupuncture needles and electrical stimulation, each lasting 30 minutes.

The true acupuncture group was treated at four acupuncture points thought to affect headaches and with enough electrical stimulation to elicit a “deqi” sensation, which includes “soreness, numbness, distention or radiation that indicated effective needling”, according to the authors.

For the sham treatment, the needles were placed in areas not known to be acupuncture points and the deqi sensation was not induced.

At 16 weeks, the number of migraines reported in the true acupuncture group fell by about three attacks per month, while people in the sham acupuncture group had two fewer attacks per month.

Among the study’s limitations, about 20 per cent of the participants had previous experience with acupuncture, and it’s not known how many may have been able to guess whether their treatments were real or sham.