Women who suffer from hot flashes and other uncomfortablesymptoms of menopause may be able to find relief throughacupuncture, according to a new study.

The idea of having to lie still for 20 minutes with needlessticking out of you may not appeal to everyone. On the other hand,hormone replacement therapy — often employed to make menopause morebearable — has some problems of its own, including an increasedrisk of coronary heart disease, stroke and breast cancer.

So Turkish researchers recruited 53 postmenopausal women andassigned 27 of them to a five-week course of acupuncture (twice aweek for 20 minutes at a time) and 26 of them got sham treatmentsthat they thought were real. Women in the treatment group hadneedles inserted at 10 acupuncture points (bilaterally at ST36,LI4, KI3 and LR3, and also at EX-HN3 and CV3); women in the placebogroup were treated with blunted needles that didn’t penetrate theskin.

At the end of the study period, the women who got acupunctureshowed more relief from their symptoms compared to theircounterparts who got the fake treatment. Their hot flashes wereless severe (there was no change for women who got the shamtreatment). Both groups had improvements in their psychologicalsymptoms (as measured by the Menopause Rating Scale), though thebenefit was much greater for women who got acupuncture. Inaddition, estrogen levels were significantly higher for the womenin the treatment group compared to the controls.

Had there been more than 10 sessions, the benefits ofacupuncture might have been even greater, the researchers said. Theresults were published in the journal Acupuncture in Medicine.