Acupuncture helped relieve hot flushes in women taking the drug tamoxifen after breast cancer surgery, says a Norwegian study.

It included 59 patients randomly selected to receive either 10 weeks of traditional Chinese acupuncture or sham acupuncture. The women who received traditional acupuncture had a 50 percent reduction in daytime and nighttime hot flushes, United Press International reported.

"Acupuncture is increasingly used in western countries to treat the problem of hot flushes in healthy postmenopausal women, so we wanted to see whether it was effective in women with breast cancer suffering from hot flushes as a result of their anti-estrogen medication," study author Jill Hervik, a physiotherapist and acupuncturist at Vestfold Central Hospital in Tonsberg, said in a prepared statement.

Tamoxifen can cause hot flushes and many other symptoms experienced by women going through menopause, UPI reported.

The study was presented at the European Breast Cancer Conference in Berlin.