Nearly one-quarter of all women ail from depression when pregnant. Several of them show reluctance for taking any form of anti-depressant medications due to worries about antidepressant intake causing harmful effects to their unborn babies and many women who earlier took them halted their medicines due to this reason. But presently a novel study has indicated that acupuncture could offer some reprieve when pregnant, despite the method not been broadly observed to be an effectual means of treating depression.

Investigators from the Stanford Univ. School of Medicine stated that acupuncture could be a beneficial substitute as a study on expectant mothers indicates that the method appears to be working at decreasing depressive signs much better as compared to other non-medicinal methods.

The Stanford Univ. trial enrolled 150 pregnant women with depression who were in twelve to thirty weeks of gestation. The researchers arbitrarily allocated fifty-two of these women to get acupuncture treatment particularly intended for treating depression signs, forty-nine women allotted to regular sessions of acupuncture and forty-nine of them were given Swedish massages.

Every woman entrant in the study was given twelve sessions, with each session lasting twenty-five minutes; those women offered acupuncture were not aware of the kind of treatment they were being offered. The acupuncture treatment specifically intended for depression involved insertion of needles at points over the body that corresponded to signs such as nervousness, withdrawal and dispiritedness.

Subsequent to 8 weeks of the study, nearly 2/3rd of the woman entrants that had been given acupuncture intended for treating depression sensed fifty percent and more decline in their signs, in comparison to merely below half of those women that had been offered treatments of Swedish massage or the commonly done acupuncture.

No considerable variation in the degree of total remission was noted – nearly 1/3rd in every set from the study.

Rachel Manber leading the study stated that outcomes point to the fact that a number of depression signs during gestation could be associated with physical pain which could be effectively allayed with the use of acupuncture.

Manber, a Prof. of psychiatry and behavioural sciences, Stanford added that it was rather notable particularly due to commonness of depression during the final three months of pregnancy; hence this treatment sets out against the route of how one would be expecting depression to set off.

Researchers from the study stated that treating depression during pregnancy is vitally essential for helping women in maintaining their sense of welfare and for ideal tending of themselves, their foetuses and imminently their children.

Investigators pointed out that nearly fourteen percent of expectant mothers could be suffering from depression.