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Joint pain and stiffness are the main reason women stop aromatase-inhibitor tablets early. In a large randomised trial, twelve weeks of acupuncture reduced that pain more than sham needling or no treatment, and the benefit lasted after the sessions ended.
The SWOG S1200 trial (Hershman et al., JAMA 2018) randomised 226 postmenopausal women with early breast cancer and aromatase-inhibitor arthralgia to true acupuncture, sham acupuncture or waitlist control for six weeks twice weekly then six weekly maintenance sessions. At six weeks the mean worst-pain score fell by 2.05 points with true acupuncture versus 1.07 with sham and 0.99 with waitlist on a 0 to 10 scale; the difference against sham was statistically significant and persisted at 24 and 52 weeks. Adverse events were minor bruising. The 2022 SIO-ASCO pain guideline recommends acupuncture for aromatase-inhibitor-related joint pain, the only complementary therapy to receive a firm recommendation for a specific cancer-treatment pain syndrome. Whether it improves persistence with endocrine therapy, and therefore recurrence, has not been shown.
Needling at standard and joint-specific points modulates central pain processing and local inflammation; a sham-needle arm controls for expectation, and the true-acupuncture arm still outperformed it.
Query for this technology: (TITLE:"Acupuncture for aromatase-inhibitor joint pain" OR ABSTRACT:"Acupuncture for aromatase-inhibitor joint pain") AND (cancer OR tumor OR tumour OR oncology OR carcinoma OR lymphoma OR leukemia OR leukaemia OR myeloma OR sarcoma OR melanoma OR glioma). Results are unfiltered search hits about Acupuncture for aromatase-inhibitor joint pain, not a curated reading list.
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