Acupuncture for Chronic Pain
Being a massive nerd, I found this article incredibly interesting. If you’re a sufferer of chronic pain you will find it interesting too. Chronic pain is a very complex situation. It’s a lot more involved than just the same pain you had for a minor injury hanging around for a long time. For example, there can be changes in the nervous system that involve types of nerve receptors that normally report on things like pressure morphing to become pain receptors. What this means is that when you feel pressure in that area, such as someone merely pressing their finger into your skin, it will be perceived by the brain as pain. Makes living pretty hard.
Anyway, a recent study found that acupuncture was able to make changes in the nervous system to help overcome chronic pain. The article had a lot of fancy neurophysiology talk but here’s a sentence we all should be able to understand: “After acupuncture, patients’ connectivities were restored almost to the levels seen in healthy controls.”
If you need a referral for a good acupuncturist let me know. There are a couple of fantastic people in Bondi Junction.
To read the full article click here .
Abstract
Background Acupuncture is gaining in popularity as a treatment for chronic low back pain (cLBP); however, its therapeutic mechanisms remain controversial, partly because of the absence of an objective way of measuring subjective pain. Resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) has demonstrated aberrant default mode network (DMN) connectivity in patients with chronic pain, and also shown that acupuncture increases DMN connectivity in pain-modulator and affective-emotional brain regions of healthy subjects.
Objective This study sought to explore how cLBP influences the DMN and whether, and how, the altered DMN connectivity is reversed after acupuncture for clinical pain.
Methods RsfMRI data from 20 patients with cLBP, before and after 4 weeks of treatment, and 10 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (without treatment) were analysed using independent components analyses to determine connectivity within the DMN, and combined with correlation analyses to compute covariance between changes in DMN connectivity and changes in clinical pain. Visual analogue scale data were assessed to rate clinical pain levels.
Results Less connectivity within the DMN was found in patients with cLBP than in healthy controls, mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus and precuneus. After acupuncture, patients’ connectivities were restored almost to the levels seen in healthy controls. Furthermore, reductions in clinical pain were correlated with increases in DMN connectivity.
Conclusions This result suggests that modulation of the DMN by acupuncture is related to its therapeutic effects on cLBP. Imaging of the DMN provides an objective method for assessment of the effects of acupuncture-induced analgesia.
