Abstract
Acupuncture may potentially be an alternative therapy for acute gouty arthritis, a common inflammation model with multiple pathogenic mechanisms. In order to investigate the biological process of acute gouty arthritis and the effect of acupuncture, 1 H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabonomics has been applied to acquire urine metabolom data. Acute gouty arthritis model rats were induced by monosodium urate (MSU) crystals. The acupuncture on ST-36 (Zusanli) and SP-6 (Sanyinjiao) acupoints was applied for nine consecutive days. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) have been used to compare the time course urine metabolic perturbations. The prominent changes in endogenous urinary metabolites in acute gouty arthritis rats comprised increased levels of citrate and succinate, and decrease of allantoin, lactate, formate, trimethyl-N-oxide (TMAO) and taurine on the 3 rd day after MSU injection; and on day 9, Citrate, succinate, and allantoin began to recover to the original level, whereas formate, taurine, TMAO and lactate further decreased, which showed their incompletely recovery. Acupuncture treatment appears to reverse the levels of most metabolites affected by acute gouty arthritis, however, with significant increase levels of acetate, acetoacetate, allantoin, creatine/creatinine, phenylacetylglycine (PAG), taurine and TMAO on day 3; all these metabolites began to recover to the original level on day 9 except for creatine/creatinine, which slightly increased, demonstrating the therapeutic effects of acupuncture on acute gouty arthritis. Our work shows the potential of an NMR-based metabonomic approach in the study of biological effects of acupuncture on acute gouty arthritis
Highlights
Gouty arthritis is a common inflammation model with multiple pathogenic mechanisms seen in clinical practice, for which acupuncture is used as an alternative therapy
The levels of most metabolites affected in acute gouty arthritis, with significant increase in the levels of allantoin, creatine/creatinine, taurine, TMAO, PAG, acetate and acetoacetate on day 3. All these metabolites began to recover to the original level, whereas creatine/ creatinine slightly increased on day 9
1H Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabonomics was used to demonstrate the metabolic perturbation induced by experimental acute gouty arthritis and traditional acupuncture treatment
Summary
Gouty arthritis is a common inflammation model with multiple pathogenic mechanisms seen in clinical practice, for which acupuncture is used as an alternative therapy. Previous UPLC-MS based metabonomic investigation proved that acupuncture therapy can relieve the metabolic perturbations during disease processes caused by MSU induced acute gouty arthritis; biomarkers had not been identified [1]. Acupuncture, a non-pharmacological therapy in which thin needles are inserted into the body at specific spots called acupuncture points, has long been practiced for treating acute and chronic pain, and other diseases [2]. Acupuncture influences a diverse set of body organs and functions including brain processing [4] and autonomic nervous system activity [5]. Like fMRI researches [7], have investigated brain response to acute needle stimulation, few have evaluated acupuncture effects on entire functional connectivity and in the period that extend beyond the active needle stimulation state, i.e. sustained acupuncture effects
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