Pre-acupuncture On Focal Cerebral Ischemia And Reperfusion In Rat Serum Il-1¦Â, Il-6 And Brain Of Free Radical Research,

Cerebrovascular accident (stroke) is among the three major causes of death. Therefore the effective prevention and treatments have significant medical and social value. In recent years more and more medical studies have been done on improving the tolerance to ischemia by means of preconditioning so as to lower the damage of cerebral neurons. They are becoming the hot points of the researches on stroke. It has been thousands of years to apply acupuncture & moxibustion to prevent and treat stroke. There is no doubt that acupuncture & moxibustion not only can help the people in rehabilitation after cerebral accidents and reduce the ischemic injuries but also may prevent the accidents happening. Studies have already proved that acupuncture & moxibustion can protect against cerebral ischemia reperfusion(I-R) injury. The time of acupuncture & moxibustion is more often at the beginning of the course of ischemia or before reperfusion starts. Few people pay their attentions to the studies on whether or not acupuncture & moxibustion may improve the tolerance of the body to the ischemia before it happens.Zusanli and Quchi are both on Yang Ming Channels are two common points to be used to treat and prevent stroke, we give electric-acupuncture and moxibustion for the rats on Zusanli and Quchi, 3 days ahead of proceeding middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) to form focal cerebral ischemic models. Biochemistry and immunology methods were applied as guide line. White blood cells (WBC) count, the inflammatory factors levels in blood and lipid peroxidation malondialdehyde (MDA), radical scavenging activity (GSH) level are measured after 2 hours focal ischemia following with 24 hours reperfusion, compared to the hyperthermic preconditioning group.The experimental results are as follows: compared to the sham and normal group, the leukocyte count IL-113, IL-6 in blood, MDA in the brain of the model group were significantly increased (P<0.01) and GSH in the brain significantly decreased(P<0.05). Compared to the model group, among the three preconditioning groups, WBC count, IL-113, IL-6 and MDA, were depressed in different degree, and GSH showed higher changing tendency.The results suggest that pre-acupuncture & moxibustion can inhibit the inflammatory reaction and free radical injury of cerebral I-R, and protect the neuron damage in I-R. The protective function of moxibustion is better than electrical acupuncture.Our study shows that pre-acupuncutre & moxibustion may realize the protective function to the cerebral neurons by exploding the endogenous mechanism against ischemic damage. Further studies are needed to investigate the mechanism of pre-acupuncture & moxibus-tion preconditioning method.