A review of the medical literature on acupuncture and female fertility published in the journal Fertility and Sterility has shown that acupuncture can help reduce stress, increase blood flow to the reproductive organs and normalise ovulation and the menstrual cycle. As such, women struggling to get pregnant may want to add acupuncture to their roster of fertility-boosting treatments, according to study author Dr. Raymond Chang of Cornell University. Stress is known to adversely affect ovulation, and therefore it is logical that acupuncture would assist normal ovulation through the release of beta-endorphins. Many previous studies examined the benefits of acupuncture when added to other fertility treatments. Recent reports have shown that women who incorporate acupuncture into their in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment are more likely to become pregnant than those who use IVF alone (see NEWS 69), and that women who used acupuncture without any other fertility treatments were just as likely to conceive in the same period of time as women who took a fertility drug.