A Study On The Effect Of Acupuncture At The Onset Of Magnetic Resonance On The Brain Network Related To Migraine Pain Based On Magnetic Resonance Resting State

Background:The quality of daily life of migraine patients has been seriously influenced by the repeated migraine attacks and its ubiquitous sleep disorders.Thus,to study the mechanisms of migraine and its therapeutic treatments are of great importance.A large number of clinical studies have demonstrated that acupuncture is effective in treating migraine and the practical guidelines of acupuncture for migraine has also been established recently.In the past decades,with the fast development of functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI),significant improvements have been made in the field of researches on the mechanisms of diseases and acupuncture treatment.Objective:In the current study,we designed an fMRI research on migraine without aura(MWoA)with healthy subjects as control to detect the specified abnormal changes in the pain-related networks of MWoA.We also tried to detect the modulatory effects of acupuncture at GB41 on the pain-related networks of MWoA patients.Methods:A total of 19 MWoA patients and another 18 age and gender-matched healthy control(HC)subjects were recruited in the current study.The MWoA patients received resting state fMRI scanning before and after the acupuncture at Zulinqi respectively while the HC subjects received only one resting state fMRI scanning as control.As three pain-related resting state brain functional networks,the DMN,SMN and RFPN were selected as the key points of our research.We tried to explore the abnormal functional connectivity(FC)changes of brain regions involved in the DMN,SMN and RFPN using independent component analysis(ICA).On this basis,the modulatory effects of acupuncture at GB41 between the three pain-related brain networks in MWoA patients was further discussed by the method of Granger causality analysis(GCA).Results:1.Based on ICA method,a total of 3 resting-state networks were extracted including right frontoparietal network(RFPN),default mode network(DMN),sensorimotor network(SMN).2.The contrast between the FC of MWoA patients before acupuncture at GB41 and that of the HC subjects showed that overlapping the SMN,DMN,RFPN revealed significantly decreased FC in MWoA patients compared with HC subject.3.Altered effective connectivity between resting-state networks in MWoA patients:there were two causal links between SMN and DMN,between RFPN and DMN(P<0.05)in MWoA patients,while there was only one causal links between RFPN and DMN(P<0.05)in healthy subjects.Compared with healthy subjects,MWoA patients presented the more complex effective connectivity between brain networks,there were significant difference in causal links between RFPN and DMN(P<0.05).4.The regulating effect of acupuncture on resting-state brain networks in MWoA patients:there was only one causal links between RFPN and DMN(P<0.05)in MWoA patients after needling at GB41.Compared with MWoA patients before needling at GB41,MWoA patients after needling at GB41,showed significant improvement in causal links between RFPN and DMN(P<0.05).Compared with healthy subjects,MWoA patients after needling at GB41,showed significant improvement in causal links between RFPN and DMN(P<0.05).Conclusion:The results of the current study demonstrate that there are certain specified abnormal changes in the DMN,RFPN and SMN of MWoA patients.The results also indicated that acupuncture GB41 could modulate the pain-related networks by enhancing the effective connectivity internetwork from RFPN to DMN to reduce the effective connectivity internetwork from SMN to DMN.The results presented here could serve as a possible neuro-imaging interpretation of the mechanisms of migraine and the mechanisms of the effect of acupuncture.