This May Be How Acupuncture Tamps Down Stress
Acupuncture may work by targeting
the same pathways that stress travels along, according to a new study in rats
from Georgetown University Medical Center and published in the journal Endocrinology.
Ladan Eshkevari, PhD, a nurse
anesthetist, licensed acupuncturist and associate professor in the department
of nursing and the department of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown
University Medical Center, noticed that the acupuncture patients coming to her
for pain were reporting improvement of symptoms unrelated to their pain, like
chronic stress, depression, sleep and appetite.
“There was nothing in the literature
about acupuncture for PTSD and chronic stress,” she says, so she decided to
study it. To find out if acupuncture was affecting chronic stress, Eshkevari
and a team of researchers looked at what happened in a key pathway in dealing
with stress for both humans and rats: the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis
(HPA). It’s the same pathway targeted by some anti-anxiety drugs and
antidepressants, Eshkevari says, and the HPA is involved in the production of
the stress hormone cortisol.
In the experiment, the researchers
compared four groups of rats: one group was stressed and given acupuncture;
another group was stressed and given sham acupuncture (at a non-acupuncture
point to make sure any results weren’t due to a placebo effect); a third group
was stressed and didn’t get any acupuncture; and a final control group just
hung out without any interventions.
First, the researchers decided to
look at an acupuncture point called stomach 36; according to Chinese medicine,
it’s a potent point associated with stress, stomach issues and pain, and in
humans, it’s located right below the knee behind the tibia bone. The rat
equivalent of stomach 36 is on the hind paw near the knee, Eshevari says.
Because most people who get
acupuncture come in for treatment after a stressful event, Eshkevari says, she
wanted to expose the rats to stress before treatment. She put them in a bucket
of ice that made their legs cold for about an hour, then let the rats acclimate
to room temperature before their 20-minute-long acupuncture sessions.
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