At the recent annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology came the following report of acupuncture improving heart rate variability.  The article below is taken from the Internal Medicine News website:

 

CHICAGO – Traditional acupuncture improves heart rate variability, and it may prove to reduce the risk of sudden death for patients with established coronary heart disease, a pilot study suggests.

The blinded study with a sham-acupuncture control arm demonstrated that acupuncture accomplishes autonomic remodeling via sympathovagal modulation as reflected in increased heart rate variability (HRV), according to Dr. Puja K. Mehta of the Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles. The clinically meaningful improvements in heart rate variability in this pilot study lay the groundwork for a future large outcome-based clinical trial of traditional acupuncture in patients with known CHD. Read the rest of this entry