Abstract
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic inflammatory disease with a high prevalence and canceration rate. The immune disorder is one of the recognized mechanisms. Acupuncture is widely used to treat patients with IBD. In recent years, an increasing number of studies have proven the effectiveness of acupuncture in the treatment of IBD, and some progress has been made in the mechanism. In this paper, we reviewed the studies related to acupuncture for IBD and focused on the immunomodulatory mechanism. We found that acupuncture could regulate the innate and adaptive immunity of IBD patients in many ways. Acupuncture exerts innate immunomodulatory effects by regulating intestinal epithelial barrier, toll-like receptors, NLRP3 inflammasomes, oxidative stress, and endoplasmic reticulum stress and exerts adaptive immunomodulation by regulating the balance of Th17/Treg and Th1/Th2 cells. In addition, acupuncture can also regulate intestinal flora.
Highlights
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic, inflammatory, and autoimmune intestinal disease, which is characterized by abdominal pain, diarrhea, pus and bloody stool, intestinal obstruction, and intestinal perforation [1, 2]
Epidemiological results show that the prevalence of IBD has been increasing in the past decade. e prevalence rate can be as high as 0.3% to 0.5% in Western countries such as Europe and North America and 0.05% in East Asia [7], with the canceration rate as high as 15% [8]
After 15 minutes of intervention with moxibustion and acupuncture at Tianshu (ST25) and Shangjuxu (ST37), respectively, the results showed that compared with the model group, the expression of IL-17A decreased in the moxibustion group, while there was no change in IL-22
Summary
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic, inflammatory, and autoimmune intestinal disease, which is characterized by abdominal pain, diarrhea, pus and bloody stool, intestinal obstruction, and intestinal perforation [1, 2]. Acupuncture, one of the most popular nonpharmacological therapies, has been used worldwide to treat patients with IBD due to its remarkable effect [14, 15]. It can improve the main symptoms of IBD patients, such as abdominal pain, diarrhea, and bloody purulent stool and alleviate the accompanying symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, and fatigue [16,17,18]. A meta-analysis involving 13 RCTs with 1030 participants showed that acupuncture alone and acupuncture combined with medicine were more effective than conventional medicine in the treatment of UC [19] Another meta-analysis showed that acupuncture and Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine moxibustion were more effective than oral sulphasalazine in treating patients with IBD [18]. The mechanism of acupuncture in the treatment of IBD has made certain progress, especially in the regulation of immune disorders. erefore, this review summarized the previous studies to explain the immunomodulatory mechanism of acupuncture in the treatment of IBD
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