Acupuncture Times Your guide to acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine and TCM — explore acupoints, herbs and formulas, plus the latest acupuncture research news.
Related Articles
Diminished ovarian reserve — a condition in which the ovaries contain fewer eggs than expected for a woman’s age — is a significant cause of infertility and a persistent challenge in assisted reproduction. This systematic review and meta-analysis pooled evidence from eleven randomised controlled trials involving 885 infertile women with diminished ovarian reserve who were undergoing in vitro fertilisation or intracytoplasmic sperm injection, in order to evaluate whether acupuncture could improve their reproductive outcomes.
The pooled results showed that acupuncture was associated with a 25% increase in clinical pregnancy rate, a 22% increase in live birth rate, and a 30% increase in embryo implantation rate compared with control groups. Acupuncture also appeared to improve the number of oocytes retrieved, the number of optimal embryos obtained, and oestradiol levels on the day of the human chorionic gonadotrophin trigger injection. Subgroup analyses supported acupuncture’s benefit on clinical pregnancy rate regardless of the type of acupuncture used or the number of acupoints employed per session. Sensitivity analyses confirmed that these pooled estimates were robust. However, the certainty of evidence across all outcomes ranged from very low to moderate, and the total number of trials included was relatively small.
Conclusion: Acupuncture shows promise as a beneficial adjunct intervention for women with diminished ovarian reserve undergoing in vitro fertilisation or intracytoplasmic sperm injection, but larger and more rigorously designed randomised controlled trials are needed to confirm these findings.
Source: Xu L, Liang X, Wang W and colleagues. Frontiers in endocrinology (2026). View on PubMed (PMID 42358682) · doi:10.3389/fendo.2026.1840157
