Effect of Laser Acupuncture on Obesity: a Patient-Assessor-Blinded, Randomized, Sham-controlled Crossover Trial

The number of obese people around the world has been increasing rapidly. It has been estimated that over 10% of the world's adult population are obese. Obesity is associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease, type II diabetes, stroke, osteoarthritis, and certain types of cancer. These deleterious conditions are detrimental to individuals' quality of life, and places emotional and financial burden on the individual, their families, and society as a whole. Much more needs to be done to improve treatments for obesity.

Current methods to treat obesity include dietary intervention, lifestyle intervention, drug intervention, or bariatric surgery. Among these, acupuncture, in a comprehensive program for weight loss, has been increasing in popularity. However, previous systematic reviews assessing the effects of acupuncture on obesity discovered promising but inconclusive results. The low quality methodology used in those trials further reduced the strength of those conclusions. In addition, the lack of safety procedures used in traditional manual acupuncture could lead to adverse events such as retroperitoneal abscess, rapid dermal spread of breast cancer, pneumothorax, cardiac tamponade, viral hepatitis, and granuloma.

In comparison with traditional manual acupuncture, laser acupuncture therapy has several advantages. These advantages include ease of application, precision in dose measurement, painlessness, and non-invasiveness. It is a quick and safe therapy with low cost and no risk of infection. As laser acupuncture does not produce local sensation, double blind randomized controlled studies are also much easier to perform.

Laser acupuncture has been widely used in medical fields for over 30 years. Clinical research on the efficacy of laser acupuncture has also increased. Several studies have showed that laser acupuncture could be an effective treatment of obesity. Low-level laser therapy as a non-invasive approach for body contouring and spot fat reduction has also been reported. However, there are several experimental limitations that have to be considered. For instance, absence of placebo (sham) control, combination with low-calorie diet, and lack of sufficient comparative parameters have been questioned . For these reasons, investigators decided to conduct a patient-assessor-blinded, randomized, sham-controlled crossover pilot trial to investigate the effects of laser acupuncture with Gallium Aluminum Arsenide (GaAlAs) laser irradiation on weight loss, fat reduction, body contouring, and quality of life in people suffering from obesity.