a needle daily. inserting needles into certain acupuncture points, represented here in the form of points scored, appears to stimulate the tissues to release a painkiller chemical.
Takahiro Takano
millions of people worldwide use acupuncture to relieve a variety of painful conditions, but it is still not clear how the ancient works treatment. Now a new study in mice shows that the insertion of an acupuncture needle activates the pain receptors removing nearby. In addition, a compound that stimulates the response of these receptors increases pain-a finding that could one day lead to drugs that improve the effectiveness of acupuncture in people.
The researchers developed two hypotheses for how acupuncture relieves pain. It holds the needle stimulates the nerves of pain-sensing, that trigger the brain to release endorphins opiumlike compounds called circulating in the body. The other holds that acupuncture works through a placebo effect, in which the mind releases endorphins from the patient. Neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York was skeptical about both hypotheses because acupuncture does not hurt and often works when the needles are inserted near the painful site. Nedergaard instead suspected that when acupuncturists insert and turn the hands, they cause minor damage to the tissue, which releases a compound called adenosine that acts as a local analgesic.
Nedergaard first affected the study as a summer project for her daughter then 16 years, Nanna Goldman. Goldman and other researchers in the Nedergaard lightly anesthetized laboratory mice to get them to hold still, inserted a needle into a point on the leg of acupuncture, and sampled the fluid around the needle. They found a 24 times increase in adenosine, which seemed promising
Then they tested whether the strengthening of the action of adenosine helped mitigate two types of chronic pain of foot pain inflammation, underlying conditions such as arthritis. and pain from nerve damage, which occurs in conditions such as spinal cord or the complications of diabetes. By performing neurosurgery or injecting a substance that promoted inflammation, the team created mice that had one of these conditions in their feet. Both types of chronic pain are decreased by mouse mild stimuli that would not disturb the animals comfortable. Next, the researchers tested the sensitivity of each mouse with two types of stimuli: touch, they measured how quickly the mouse pulled its sore foot off a metal filament; and heat, which they measured by shining a laser pointer Class sore foot of the animal and measuring the speed with which he shot it up there.
Inserting an acupuncture needle or locally injecting a drug that stimulated the action of adenosine made mice less sensitive to pain. But no treatment eased the pain in mice that lack a cell surface receptor through which adenosine exerts its effects. These results demonstrate that adenosine acts as a biochemical messenger that helped ease the pain during acupuncture, says Nedergaard. The researchers obtained further confirmation showing that both treatments reduced activity in an area of the brain-sensing pain called the anterior cingulate cortex.
To determine whether they could increase the analgesic effects of acupuncture, the researchers gave the mice a drug that leads injured tissue to accumulate more adenosine. The drug adenosine paste made about three times as long and has tripled the relief of pain period from 1 hour to 3, the researchers report online today in Nature Neuroscience . Although the drug they used anti-cancer drug called Deoxycoformycin, is too toxic to be used routinely in clinical, research Nedergaard called a "proof of principle that you can enhance the effect of acupuncture. "
the work is" historical ", which was" very carefully done, with a very clear case that was attacked on many levels, "says Vitaly Napadow, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Charlestown , Massachusetts. More research is needed to see if the path of pain relief does not work only in anesthetized mice, but also in awake humans. "What it really flies in humans, I do not know," he said. "But I think it is a very important first step."
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