Efficacy and safety of acupuncture for dizziness and vertigo in emergency department: a pilot cohort study

BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Research Article

Chia-Yun Chen¹  Shun-Chang Chang¹  Tsung-Chieh Lee¹  Po-Chi Hsu¹  Lun-Chien Lo²  John. Y. Chiang³  Chih-Wen Chiu⁴ 

[1] Department of Chinese medicine, Changhua Christian hospital, Changhua, Taiwan;Department of Chinese medicine, Changhua Christian hospital, Changhua, Taiwan;Graduate Institute of Statistical and informational Science, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, Taiwan;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan;Department of Healthcare Administration and Medical Informatics, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan;Department of Emergency Medicine, Changhua Christian hospital, Changhua, Taiwan;

关键词: Dizziness and vertigo;    Emergency department (ED);    Clinical trial;    Acupuncture;    Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM);   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12906-015-0704-6

 received in 2015-01-09, accepted in 2015-05-29,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundDizziness and vertigo account for roughly 4% of chief symptoms in the emergency department (ED). Pharmacological therapy is often applied for these symptoms, such as vestibular suppressants, anti-emetics and benzodiazepines. However, every medication is accompanied with unavoidable side-effects. There are several research articles providing evidence of acupuncture treating dizziness and vertigo but few studies of acupuncture as an emergent intervention in ED. We performed a pilot cohort study to evaluate the efficacy and safety of acupuncture in treating patients with dizziness and vertigo in ED.MethodsA total of 60 participants, recruited in ED, were divided into acupuncture and control group. Life-threatening conditions or central nervous system disorders were excluded to ensure participants’ safety. The clinical effect of treating dizziness and vertigo was evaluated by performing statistical analyses on data collected from questionnaires of Dizziness Handicap Inventory (DHI), Visual Analog Scale (VAS) of dizziness and vertigo, and heart rate variability (HRV).ResultsThe variation of VAS demonstrated a significant decrease (p-value: 0.001 and p-value: 0.037) between two groups after two different durations: 30 mins and 7 days. The variation of DHI showed no significant difference after 7 days. HRV revealed a significant increase in high frequency (HF) in the acupuncture group. No adverse event was reported in this study.ConclusionAcupuncture demonstrates a significant immediate effect in reducing discomforts and VAS of both dizziness and vertigo. This study provides clinical evidence on the efficacy and safety of acupuncture to treat dizziness and vertigo in the emergency department.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02358239. Registered 5 February 2015

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Chiu et al. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.