Efficacy Of Sea-Band® For Migraine-Related Nausea Shown by Published Clinical Trial

Not enough migraine is capable of being a disabling neurological disorder, it is frequently aggravated by accompanying nausea. Stimulation of the acupoint PC6 Neiguan, an approach to controlling nausea adopted by traditional Chinese medicine, has never been documented by published clinical studies in medical literature for the control of migraine-related nausea, until now. Published in the May 2012 Neurological Sciences (journal of the Italian Neurological Society)*, "Acupressure in the control of migraine-associated nausea" is a clinical trial demonstrating that continuous stimulation of the acupoint PC6 Neiguan on the inner wrist, as provided by Sea-Band® wristbands, showed statistically significant improvement in migraine-related nausea versus not using the wristbands. Previous studies have demonstrated the efficacy of Sea-Band and its continual stimulation of the acupressure point PC6 for nausea relief due to motion sickness, postoperative nausea and chemotherapy-induced nausea. However, this May 2012 study is the first published research aimed at verifying that pressure applied to the acupoint PC6 with Sea-Band is effective at relieving nausea during migraine.

Migraine affects more than 29.5 million Americans, according to the National Headache Foundation, and is considered by the World Health Organization as the 19th leading cause of all years lived with disability for both males and females. Eight out of every 10 people in the U.S. who are diagnosed with migraine report experiencing nausea.

"This new research supports what millions of Sea-Band users already know; that the acupressure wristbands provide fast, consistent, drug-free relief for nausea associated with migraine headaches," commented Leonard Nihan, president, Sea-Band U.S. "We're pleased to have this published study to reinforce Sea-Band's efficacy to the scientific and medical communities."

The Italian study included 40 female patients suffering from migraine without aura, if nausea was always present as an accompanying symptomatology of their migraine. The patients were treated randomly for a total of six migraine attacks: three with the application of Sea-Band wristbands, which applies continual pressure to the PC6 acupoint (phase SB), and three without it (phase C).

The intensities of nausea at the onset at 30, 60, 120 and 240 minutes were evaluated on a scale from zero to 10. The values were always significantly lower in phase SB than in phase C. Also the number of patients who reported at least a 50 percent reduction in the nausea score was significantly higher in phase SB than in phase C at 30, 60 and 120 minutes. The average nausea scores dropped in the SB phase from 6.36 ± 0.35 in T0, to 4.60 ± 0.39 in T1, to 3.11 ± 0.40 in T2, to 1.88 ± 0.31 in T3 and to 0.92 ± 0.22 in T4. At each time step taken into consideration after the application of the Sea-Band wristbands, there was a statistically significant improvement over the non-treated phases. Moreover, there were a high percentage of responders to the treatment: i.e. 46.8 percent at 60 minutes; 71.8 percent at 120 minutes; 84.3 percent at 240 minutes with a consistent response over time.

Source-Eurekalert