Department of Cardiovascular and Neurologic Diseases, College of Oriental Medicine, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea.
J Altern Complement Med. 2011 Apr;17(4):357-62. doi: 10.1089/acm.2010.0331. Epub 2011 Apr 7.
Japanese style, superficial acupuncture (SA) has been clinically evaluated for its therapeutic benefit, yet the neurophysiologic responses associated with SA remain unclear. This study was performed to measure changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) following SA at LI-4 and LI-11 in healthy volunteers using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). Changes in SPECT activity following Japanese style SA were compared to previous reports of SPECT changes following electroacupuncture (EA) at the same acupoints.
Ten (10) healthy volunteers were enrolled for this study. A few days after the baseline brain SPECT, SA was performed at LI-4 and LI-11 for 15 minutes and a second brain perfusion image was acquired for each subject. We used SPM2 to analyze the changes in rCBF after SA through a paired t test. In addition, the differences of rCBF changes between SA and EA were compared using a two-sample t test.
Cerebral blood perfusion significantly increased after SA in the left superior frontal gyrus, left middle cingulum, left insular, right medial orbital frontal gyrus, and right middle cingulum (paired t test, uncorrected p < 0.005), while no regions showed a significant decrease. The results comparing poststimulation images between SA and EA demonstrated that the perfusion in the right lingual, both thalamus, left middle temporal gyrus, left insula, and both cerebellum were significantly increased in SA compared with EA (false discovery rate [FDR] corrected p < 0.05).
There were specific increase patterns of rCBF following SA at LI-4 and LI-11, which were similar to those following EA. However, there were significant differences in the decrease pattern of rCBF between SA and EA, which might be due to the difference of the strength of acupuncture stimulation between the two methods. These results may contribute to developing a better strategy to a select stimulation method in acupuncture therapy.
日式浅刺针法（SA）已在临床上评估其治疗益处，但与 SA 相关的神经生理反应仍不清楚。本研究旨在使用单光子发射计算机断层扫描（SPECT）测量健康志愿者在 LI-4 和 LI-11 进行 SA 后局部脑血流（rCBF）的变化。将日式 SA 后 SPECT 活性的变化与之前相同穴位电针（EA）后 SPECT 变化的报告进行比较。
本研究纳入了 10 名健康志愿者。在基线脑 SPECT 几天后，对 LI-4 和 LI-11 进行 15 分钟的 SA，并为每位受试者获取第二张脑灌注图像。我们使用 SPM2 通过配对 t 检验分析 SA 后 rCBF 的变化。此外，还使用两样本 t 检验比较了 SA 和 EA 之间 rCBF 变化的差异。
SA 后，左侧额上回、左侧中扣带回、左侧岛叶、右侧内侧眶额回和右侧中扣带回的脑血流灌注明显增加（配对 t 检验，未校正 p<0.005），而没有区域显示明显减少。比较 SA 和 EA 后刺激图像的结果表明，与 EA 相比，SA 时右侧舌回、双侧丘脑、左侧颞中回、左侧岛叶和双侧小脑的灌注明显增加（错误发现率 [FDR]校正 p<0.05）。
LI-4 和 LI-11 进行 SA 后，rCBF 呈现出特定的增加模式，与 EA 相似。然而，SA 和 EA 之间 rCBF 减少模式存在显著差异，这可能是由于两种方法的针刺刺激强度不同所致。这些结果可能有助于制定更好的策略来选择针刺治疗中的刺激方法。
