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Acupuncture may be effective in treating Parkinson's
London, Jan. 23 : South Korean researchers say that acupuncture, a traditional Chinese medicine technique of inserting and manipulating needles into various points on the body, may be effective in treating the type of brain inflammation suffered by patients with Parkinson's disease. Lead researcher Sabina Lim at Kyung Hee University in Seoul and her colleagues used a standard mouse model of Parkinson's disease, in which injections of a chemical known as MPTP kill off brain cells that manufacture dopamine. Some of the injected mice were then administered acupuncture every two days in two spots, one behind the knee and one on top of the foot, the points which in humans could potentially be seen as targets for treatment of Parkinson's. Another group of mice received acupuncture in two spots on the hips, not believed to be effective for acupuncture, while a third group had no acupuncture at all. By the end of seven days, the MPTP injections had decreased dopamine levels both in the mice that not receiving acupuncture, and those who received it to about half the normal amount. But in the acupuncture-treated group, dopamine levels declined much less steeply, and nearly 80 per cent of the dopamine remained. Lim says that the mechanism behind this effect is still unknown, but she and her team suspect that because inflammation in the brain often accompanies and worsens other symptoms of Parkinson's disease, acupuncture might maintain dopamine levels by preventing inflammation. They have already performed a clinical trial of acupuncture in humans with Parkinson's disease, but the sample size was not large enough to verify that there was a definite effect. "The bottom line," Nature magazine quoted Lim as saying, "is that, even though Parkinson's patients are treated with acupuncture therapies in Korea, it is difficult to say that it can 'cure' the disease." Ruth Walker, a movement disorders researcher at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, said that using acupuncture to treat Parkinson's would also mean diagnosing the disease early enough. "Parkinson's doesn't even manifest until you have lost a large proportion of dopamine cells," she said. The study has been published in Brain Research1.
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