Active acupuncture results in a larger reduction in post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms as compared to sham treatment, according to the latest installment of a 14-year collaboration between Wayne State University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences Associate Professor Seth Norrholm, Ph.D.; Professor and the David and Patricia Barron Chair for PTSD Neurobiology at Wayne State University Tanja Jovanovic, Ph.D.; and researchers at the VA Medical Center in Long Beach, Calif.

Study principal investigator Michael Hollifield, M.D., and his team at the VA used a psychological test developed by Drs. Norrholm and Jovanovic, which is also used in the latter’s studies with traumatized populations in Detroit, to show that acupuncture also improved fear extinction learning.

In the study, combat veterans with PTSD were assigned to a placebo sham condition or active acupuncture condition. The findings, based on the gold standard measure of PTSD severity, the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5, or CAPS-5, were featured this month by the Brain and Behavioral Research Foundation.

Acupuncture is a technique in which practitioners insert fine needles into the skin to treat health problems, per the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Acupuncture has been in use in some form for at least 2,500 years, originated from traditional Chinese medicine.

The study, Acupuncture for Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial, was first published by JAMA Psychiatry last February.

“In addition to the clinical symptom severity measures, this study included an assessment of fear extinction, or the ability to reduce one’s level of fear to a stimulus that was previously paired with an aversive outcome,” said Dr. Norrholm, director of the Neuroscience Center for Anxiety, Stress and Trauma at Wayne State’s Integrative Biosciences Center. “In the real world, this would include a scenario when a combat veteran learns to fear certain sights, sounds and smells that are present during a traumatic event like an improvised explosive device explosion. In the laboratory, this includes pairing geometric shapes with an aversive outcome like an air blast to the neck and then having increased fear responses to the shapes.”

In the real world, fear extinction occurs during exposure therapy when the combat veteran imagines his or her traumatic event over and over to a therapist, so the sights, smells and sounds no longer produce fear. In the laboratory, the geometric shapes are shown repeatedly without the air blast consequence, and fear of the shapes decreases after several presentations.

“In both the real world and laboratory cases, this process is called fear extinction, which can be impaired in PTSD,” Dr. Norrholm said.