Cerebral Responses to Acupuncture at GV24 and Bilateral GB13 in Rat Models of Alzheimer's Disease.

Shaoyang Cui,Jianting Huang,Qing Mei Wang,Binbin Nie,Mingzhu Xu,Chunzhi Tang,Xinsheng Lai,John Wong,Xun Luo,Baoci Shan

doi:10.1155/2018/8740284

Abstract

Acupuncture has been widely used in China to treat neurological diseases including Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, its mechanism remains unclear. In the present study, eighty healthy Wistar rats were divided into a normal control group (n = 15) and premodel group (n = 65). Forty-five rats that met the criteria for the AD model were then randomly divided into the model group (MG), the nonacupoint group (NG), and the acupoint group (AG). All rats received positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, and the images were analyzed with Statistical Parametric Mapping 8.0. MG exhibited hypometabolism in the olfactory bulb, insular cortex, orbital cortex, prelimbic cortex, striatum, parietal association cortex, visual cortex, cingulate gyrus, and retrosplenial cortex. AG exhibited prominent and extensive hypermetabolism in the thalamus, hypothalamus, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, cerebral peduncle, midbrain tegmentum, and pontine tegmentum compared to NG. These results demonstrated that acupuncturing at GV24 and bilateral GB13 acupoints may improve the learning and memory abilities of the AD rats, probably via altering cerebral glucose metabolism (CGM) in the hypothalamus, thalamus, and brain stem. The observed effects of acupuncture may be caused by regulating the distribution of certain kinds of neurotransmitters and enhancing synaptic plasticity.

Highlights

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative brain disease and the most common type of dementia in the elderly [1], accounting for approximately 40–50% of the total cases of dementia [2]
There was a statistically significant difference in the total reaction time (TRT) of pretreatment memory among the different groups (F(3,56) = 3.366; P = 0 025): the TRT of pretreatment memory was much longer in model group (MG) (P = 0 028), nonacupoint group (NG) (P = 0 026), and acupoint group (AG) (P = 0 010) compared with control group (CG) (Figure 2)
Our results demonstrated that the activated brain regions in AG were much more prominent and extensive compared to NG in AD rats

Summary

Introduction

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative brain disease and the most common type of dementia in the elderly [1], accounting for approximately 40–50% of the total cases of dementia [2]. The symptoms of AD inevitably worsen progressively and lead to fatality [3]. Over 40 million people worldwide suffer from AD [4], including approximately 700,000 Americans aged 65 years or older in the United States, where it costs $259 billion in 2017 [5]. The main neuropathological features of AD are senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles [6], which gradually accumulate in the brain. These features damage brain circuits involved in cognition. The diagnosis of AD is mainly based on the clinical manifestation of symptoms, including progressive cognitive deficit, initially confined to episodic memory systems [7]

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Conclusion