| Background:The characteristics of migraine, which is repeated attacks and attends secondary symptoms, seriously affect patients’ life. A large number of clinical practices and researches show the perfect effect of acupuncture treatment on migraine. Besides, the effect has been widely recognized. Therefore, it has important clinical significance to study the central nervous effect mechanism on treating migraine by acupuncture. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is a kind of significant non-invasive research tools to explore central nervous system disease, has been widely used. In recent years, scholars have achieved fruitful feat in the field of magnetic resonance study on acupuncture.Objective:In study of patients suffering from migraine without aura (MWoA), we used magnetic resonance technique to investigate the changes of relevance between regional homogeneity in brain and headache duration before and after acupuncture treatment of group acupoints. After acquired the voxels which is provided with the strongest correlation with treatment, the central nervous system effects of acupuncture treatment with group acupoints is preliminary explored.Methods:A total of 10 MWoA patients are treated for 4 weeks by acupuncture with group acupionts, according to the practical guidelines. And structural MRI and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is scanned before and after treatment. The structural MRI data is segmented to generate cortical models by software. Then, fMRI data after preprocessing is projected to the cortical models and is calculated the regional homogeneity based on cortex. Applying partial least square (PLS) method, the regional homogeneity is estimated the relativity with migraine duration before and after acupuncture treatment, for achieving the brain regions associated with acupuncture treatment of group acupoints. The transformations and central nervous system effects of acupuncture treatment in MWoA patients is explored based on the previous researches and anatomic locations of the calculated results.Results:After treatment, the clinical symptoms of MWoA patients obviously improved. The brain regions, showing obvious correlation between regional homogeneity and migraine duration, mainly includes bilateral insula, bilateral middle cingulate, bilateral temporal pole, bilateral superior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle temporal gyrus and inferior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral rolandic operculum, bilateral frontal Inferior Triangular gyrus, right precentral gyrus, right lingual gyrus, dorsolateral superior frontal gyrus and left supplementary motor area. These brain regions are positively related to the migraine duration before acupuncture treatment with group acupoints. Oppositely, the brain regions are negatively related to the migraine duration after the treatment.Conclusion:The relevancies, between the brain regional homogeneity of MWoA patients and migraine duration, show specific changes before and after the acupuncture treatment. The brain regions which appear specific changes show significant correlation with central nervous system effects of acupuncture treatment. Acupuncture treatment of group acupoints shows notable moderating effect on brain function in MWoA patients. In aspect of iconography, the results support the central nervous system effects of acupuncture treatment with group acupoints. However, we have to admit that there are still many limitations in our study and further studies with large sample and high quality are still in need to confirm our results. |
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