The effect of ginger for relieving of primary dysmenorrhoea.

OBJECTIVE To assess the effectiveness of ginger in providing relief to patients of primary dysmenorrhoea. METHODS The clinical trial was conducted at Toyserkan Azad University in western Iran from July 10 to September 5, 2010. It comprised of 70 female students of the university with primary dysmenorrhoea.The subjects were randomly divided in to two equal groups and were given either placebo or ginger in capsule form for 3 days in first menstruation cycles. They graded the severity of their pain using a visual analogue scale. A 5-point Likert scale was used to assess response to treatment. Wilcoxor's rank-sum test was used to compare the severity of pain in the two groups. RESULTS Compared with the baseline, the decrease in the visual analogue scores of post-therapy pain in the ginger group was significantly greater than that for placebo group. In the ginger group, 29 (82.85%) subjects reported an improvement in nausea symptoms, compared with 16 (47.05%) in the placebo group. CONCLUSION Ginger is effective in minimising the pain severity in primary dysmenorrhoea.