Title : Effects of acupuncture treatment on depression insomnia : A study protocol of a multi-centre randomized controlled trial

Background: Insomnia is one of the main symptoms harassing patients with depression. More than 70% of those patients, who come to visit the doctors, are with sleep disorder. The treatment for insomnia is a very important link for depression treatment. Meanwhile, the anti-depression treatment is also important for this kind of insomnia. When it comes to acupuncture treatment, we are using Lu-7 ( Lie Que) and Kid-6(Zhao Hai) ,which are two of the eight confluence points, as the main points and subcutaneous needles at Bl-15 (Xin Shu) and Bl-23 (Shen Shu), or Bl-19 (Dan Shu), and N-HN-54 (An Mian) points to consolidate the treatment solutions. Its adequate curing effect is well proved in the practice by our senior acupuncturists in Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).Therefore,we have designed a set of optimized acupuncture treatment formula here and would like to examine if this set of optimized clinical formula is able to increase the clinical efficacy of insomnia caused by depression. Method/Design Randomized controlled multi-centre trial, will be applied in this trial with patients,diagnosed with depression insomnia. All the eligible participants, aged from 16 years to 50 years, both male and female, will be randomly assigned to receive either normal acupuncture treatment or optimized acupuncture treatment. Normal acupuncture treatment will be applied as the control group,and optimized acupuncture