Influence of acupuncture on leptin, ghrelin, insulin and cholecystokinin in obese women: a randomised, sham-controlled preliminary trial

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Ghrelin and Cholecystokinin (CCK), published as a randomized controlled trial.

To investigate the effect of acupuncture on weight loss and whether a brief acupuncture treatment of 5 weeks can change circulating levels of leptin, ghrelin, insulin and cholecystokinin (CCK) in obese women.

Why It Was Studied

Obesity is an energy balance problem caused by overeating.

Who Took Part

The study group was 40 women.

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults and middle-aged adults, women only.

40 women with a body mass index (BMI)>30 kg/m(2) were equally randomised to either an acupuncture group or a sham (non-penetrating) acupuncture group and received treatment at LI4, HT7, ST36, ST44 and SP6 bilaterally.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Ghrelin and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Both groups had two sessions of 20 min/week for a total of 10 sessions.

Serum insulin, leptin, plasma ghrelin and CCK levels were measured by ELISA.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acupuncture Points, Acupuncture Therapy, Body Mass Index, Cholecystokinin, Ghrelin, Insulin and Leptin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Ghrelin and Cholecystokinin (CCK) in 40 women.

Its findings take up roughly 3 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2012 (Acupuncture in medicine : journal of the British Medical Acupuncture Society), a journal based in England.

More context: the Ghrelin compound page and the Cholecystokinin (CCK) compound page, all human trials.