Xu X, Shibasaki H, Shindo K
Department of Brain Pathophysiology, Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine, Japan.
J Clin Neurophysiol. 1993 Jul;10(3):370-7. doi: 10.1097/00004691-199307000-00011.
Although acupuncture has a long history of analgesic effects, the mechanisms underlying its effects are still unclear. Somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) methodology has been adopted in the research of acupuncture since the 1970s. In research on the effects of acupuncture on the conventional SEP, variable results have been observed, and two different opinions concerning the presence or absence of acupuncture effects on the conventional SEP are discussed. Since the conventional SEP is mediated mainly by fast conducting sensory nerve fibers, the conventional SEP methodology, especially that for recording short-latency SEP, may be inadequate for studying acupuncture mechanisms. In the case of the long-latency cortical SEP, there are too few data available to judge the effects of acupuncture analgesia (AA). Studies on the effects of AA on pain SEPs demonstrated that AA has a suppressive effect on amplitude of the pain SEP (and affecting the latency as well in some experiments) in both animals and humans, being accompanied by increased pain threshold. Thus, acupuncture seems to have analgesic effects that are probably related to activation of the antinociceptive system, and application of the pain SEP methodology to the study of mechanisms of AA may be promising.
尽管针刺具有长期的镇痛作用，但其作用机制仍不清楚。自20世纪70年代以来，体感诱发电位（SEP）方法已被应用于针刺研究。在针刺对传统SEP影响的研究中，观察到了不同的结果，并讨论了关于针刺对传统SEP有无影响的两种不同观点。由于传统SEP主要由快速传导的感觉神经纤维介导，传统SEP方法，尤其是记录短潜伏期SEP的方法，可能不足以研究针刺机制。对于长潜伏期皮层SEP，可用数据太少，无法判断针刺镇痛（AA）的效果。关于AA对疼痛SEP影响的研究表明，AA对动物和人类的疼痛SEP振幅均有抑制作用（在一些实验中也影响潜伏期），同时伴有痛阈升高。因此，针刺似乎具有镇痛作用，这可能与抗伤害感受系统的激活有关，将疼痛SEP方法应用于AA机制的研究可能是有前景的。
