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Stick With Acupuncture, Help Your Heart


  Updated Chinese technique controls cat's blood pressure, study says
  WEDNESDAY, June 20 (HealthScoutNews) -- Being on pins and needles someday might be just the thing for your blood pressure and your heart, a new study suggests.

Using acupuncture needles with an electric charge, researchers report they were able to ease the blood pressure of a cat. The researchers say the electrically charged needles stimulated specific receptors in the animal's brain, suggesting the Chinese healing technique might offer new therapies to treat heart disease.

"Electroacupuncture's been shown previously to have beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system," says senior study author Dr. John Longhurst, professor of medicine at the University of California's College of Medicine at Irvine. "We wanted to determine which type of opioid receptor [in the brain] was critical in this effect." These receptors have to do with feeling pain and pleasure.

Practiced in China for more than 3,000 years, acupuncture is based on the theory of body energy or Qi (chee) flowing through pathways in the body. Using needles to stimulate points along those meridians, acupuncturists say they can correct imbalances and blockages in the body's energy flow.

Acupuncture needles often are twirled as they are inserted to increase their effectiveness; with electroacupuncture, the needles are stimulated by electrical charges. "Electroacupuncture is more powerful, and a more potent alternative," says Longhurst.

Electrified needles were placed in an acupuncture site above the median nerve, which connects to the part of the brain stem known as the rostral ventrolateral medulla. That region controls outflow to the body's sympathetic nervous system which, in turn, regulates the body's response to stress, including raising blood pressure by constricting the blood vessels.

Longhurst says electroacupuncture, reduced the need for oxygen under stress, keeping the sympathetic nervous system in check and controlling the cat's blood pressure.

The findings appear in the June 1 issue of Autonomic Neuroscience.

"The cardiovascular system, high blood pressure, coronary disease, heart attack and arrhythmia [irregular heartbeat], they all can be provoked by increases in the sympathetic activity. So, anything that reduces that activity is good," Longhurst says.

"This helps us narrow down the list of possibilities," of what really happens with acupuncture, says Longhurst. "We are trying to understand the mechanism that underlies acupuncture and put it into a framework that is understood and accepted from a Western perspective."

"As an acupuncturist, the potential for treating hypertension is there," says Peter Valaskatgis, a licensed acupuncturist and faculty chairman at the New England School of Acupuncture in Massachusetts.

Valaskatgis serves as a consultant to the Stop Hypertension with Acupuncture Research Program (SHARP), a combined effort of Massachusetts General Hospital, the National Institutes of Health and the New England Research Institute. The organization is assessing acupuncture's potential role in clinical trials on hypertensive patients.

Dr. Randall Zusman, a SHARP investigator and director of the division of hypertension and vascular medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, says, "I was skeptical of the whole concept until I looked more deeply. I'm fairly convinced acupuncture will work in a subset [of people]. We are trying to find which patient population will be most responsive and to which treatment regimen."

Zusman says, "We want to see if it does work, then we'll rely on others to figure out why. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence of the use of acupuncture to control high blood pressure. The problem is it has not been proven in a scientifically rigorous and statistical fashion."

Longhurst says if people "understand the mechanism, and it has scientific validity, they are more likely to use it."


  From HealthScout.com

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