The effect of laser acupuncture on hypoxia tolerance and inflammation reaction in mice with optical fiber acupuncture needle intra body

Shupeng Liu,Jianshe Yan,Tingyun Wang,Xiangfei Yang,Na Chen,Junyi Hou,Xiumei Cao,Zhenyi Chen,Minmin Xu,Fufei Pang

doi:10.1142/s1793545816500395

Abstract

Hypoxia is a disorder in which the tissues are not oxygenated adequately. The lack of oxygen may cause irreversible damage to the major organs such as the brain, heart and lungs. In severe cases, coma, seizures, and death may happen. In addition to the routine medication, acupuncture treatment has been applied as a complementary treatment to counter hypoxia. In this paper, the optical fiber acupuncture needle was fabricated using the optical fiber imbedding into the metal capillary tube with needle tip, therefore made it easy to insert into the body for the laser treatment. The laser optical fiber needle treatment to the ST36 acupoint conducted with the laser irradiation intra body. The normobaric hypoxia tolerance test results in mice show that the optical fiber needle treatment to the ST36 acupoint with laser acupuncture appears to improve the tolerance to hypoxia. The mice treated with laser acupuncture expressed high level of IL-1[Formula: see text] in serum. Our results suggest that laser optical fiber needle acupuncture may serve as a potential treatment for hypoxia.

Highlights

Acupuncture treatment has been well established as an e®ective therapy method by the clinic applications in China for thousands of years
We show that mice treated with laser acupuncture appear more tolerant to hypoxia and have high level of IL-1, a master cytokine involved in in°ammation, in the serum
Our results showed that mice in the group that treated withber laser acupuncture seemed to prolong the tolerance time to hypoxia and slow down the heart rate

Summary

Introduction

Acupuncture treatment has been well established as an e®ective therapy method by the clinic applications in China for thousands of years. Acupuncture is a fast, convenient and economical treatment method with numerous e®ective clinical validations.[1,2] Recently, acupuncture has been broadly used in clinical treatment abroad including America.[3] laser acupuncture has been developed to stimulate acupuncture points on the outer skin without infection or pain,[4] and used to improve the treatment of brain function,[5,6,7] dental disease,[8,9] and obesity.[10] The laser stimulation is an alternative method for children with needle phobia. The laser acupuncture has been clinically applied in primary care since the 1970s.12 Over the years, many studies have been reported about the therapy e®ects and the mechanism of the laser acupuncture.[13,14,15,16,17,18] because the depth of body that laser can reach is usually limited by the obstruction of skin, the e®ectiveness of the laser acupuncture treatment is reduced, especially if the locations of acupoints are deep in the body

Methods

Results

Conclusion