Acupuncture–brain interactions as hypothesized by mood scale recordings

Abstract

Mood expressions encompassing positive scales like “activity, elation, contemplation, calmness” and negative scales like “anger, excitement, depression, fatigue” were applied for introducing a new tool to assess the effects of acupuncture on brain structures. Traditional acupuncture points defined in the literature for their effects on task negative and task positive brain structures were applied to chronic disease patients supposed to have dominant negative mood scales. Burn-out syndrome (n=10) and female chronic pain patients (n=22) showed a significant improvement on positive mood scales and a decline in negative mood scales after 10 acupuncture sessions. We observed a direct effect of acupuncture on brain structures in 5 burn-out syndrome patients showing an immediate, fast suppression of unusual slow high amplitude EEG waves in response to acupuncture needle rotation. These EEG waves described here for the first time in awake patients disappeared after 10 sessions but gradually returned after 1–1.5years without acupuncture. This was accompanied with deterioration of positive mood scales and a return to negative mood scales. Both male (n=16) and female chronic pain patients reported a significant decrease of pain intensity after 10 sessions. Female patients only, however, showed a linear correlation between initial pain intensity and pain relief as well as a linear correlation between changes in pain intensity and mood scales accompanied by a drop of their heart rate during the acupuncture sessions. We hypothesized that mood scale recordings are a sensitive and specific new tool to reveal individual acupuncture–brain interaction.