Abstract
In order to study the effects of CO2 laser moxibustion on the pain and inflammatory cytokine expression in the spinal dorsal horn of rats with monosodium iodoacetate- (MIA-) induced knee osteoarthritis (KOA), we designed an experiment by randomly assigning 8 SD rats into 3 groups, namely, a CO2 laser moxibustion group, a sham treatment group, and a blank control group. The treatment group received a laser moxibustion on acupoint Dubi (ST 35; 5 min/treatment, 1 treatment/day) for 8 days, and after treatment, the rats exhibited significantly increased interhindpaw differences compared with their preinduction values. Meanwhile, cytokine microarray analysis showed that one cytokine (TIMP-1) was significantly upregulated and two cytokines (Agrin and MMP-8) were significantly downregulated in treatment group. The present study suggested that CO2 laser moxibustion created certain pain reduction in the rats with MIA-induced KOA and significantly inhibited the expression of most inflammatory cytokines in the ipsilateral spinal dorsal horn.
Highlights
Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common joint disease in adults [1], prevalently affecting the knee [2]
One day after OA induction, the values recorded from the laser moxibustion group and sham treatment groups increased significantly compared with their baseline values
Values measured from the laser moxibustion group and sham treatment group both decreased with time, but at five time points the laser moxibustion group showed better improvement than the sham treatment group: 1st day (P = 0.044), 2nd day (0.029), 12th day (0.031), 15th day (0.007), and 19th day (0.016) after the completion of all the treatment
Summary
Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common joint disease in adults [1], prevalently affecting the knee [2]. The major clinical presentation of knee OA is a chronic pain of the affected knee. Current treatment of OA primarily aims at reducing the pain. A meta-analysis found that, for reducing short-term pain in OA, commonly used drugs (NSAIDs and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) performed only slightly better than placebos [3]. Pain reduction with acupuncture and moxibustion has been a focus in recent years. These researches mainly concentrated in the field of needling analgesia, whereas little attention has been given to the moxibustion. Both stimulations target acupoints, needling and moxibustion deliver different modes of actions to acupoints, thereby likely acting via different mechanisms
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