Acupuncture could be promising for treatment of inflammatory disease
Acupuncture could be used to tackle the physical processes that lead to sepsis and could be very effective for people with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, says research published in Nature Medicine.
Sepsis is a potentially fatal whole-body inflammation that is caused by severe infection and is a major cause of death in hospitals.
“In many cases patients don’t die because of the infection,” says Dr Luis Ulloa who led the study. “They die because of the inflammatory disorder they develop after the infection. So we hoped to study how to control the inflammatory disorder.”
The researchers already knew that stimulation of one of the body’s major nerves, the vagus nerve, triggers processes in the body that reduce inflammation, so they set out to see if a form of acupuncture that sends a small electric current through that and other nerves could reduce inflammation and organ injury in septic mice.
When electroacupuncture was applied to mice with sepsis, molecules called cytokines that help limit inflammation were stimulated, and half of those mice survived for at least a week. There was no survival among mice that did not receive acupuncture.
Dr Ulloa and his team then discovered that when they removed adrenal glands – which produce hormones in the body – the electroacpuncture stopped working.
Most human cases of sepsis include sharply reduced adrenal function. In theory, electroacupuncture might still help a minority of people whose adrenal glands work well, but not many others.
So the researchers dug deeper – to find the specific anatomical changes that occurred when electroacupuncture was performed with functioning adrenal glands. Those changes included increased levels of dopamine, a substance that has important functions within the immune system. But they found that adding dopamine by itself did not curb the inflammation. They then substituted a drug called fenoldopam that mimics some of dopamine’s most positive effects, and even without acupuncture they succeeded in reducing sepsis-related deaths by 40%.
Dr Ulloa says this research shows physical evidence of acupuncture’s value beyond any that has been demonstrated before. His results show potential benefits, he adds, not just for sepsis, but treating other inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis and Crohn’s disease.
And by showing that a drug reduced sepsis deaths in mice, he has provided an innovative road map toward developing potential drugs for people.
“I don’t even know whether in the future the best solution for sepsis will be electroacupuncture or some medicine that will mimic electroacupuncture,” Dr Ulloa concludes. The bottom line, he says, is that this research has opened the door to both.
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