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Prostate pain and brain response |
| Posted on Apr 28 2008 at 5:57 PM |
| News / Blog >> Acupuncture |
Acupuncture treatment is more than twice as likely as sham treatment to improve men's symptoms of chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome. Sham acupuncture is the use of superficial needling as a control in acupuncture studies.
Malaysian researchers randomised 89 patients to either 10 weeks of twice-weekly 30-minute acupuncture sessions or sham acupuncture. The patients were scored on the NIH Chronic Prostatitis Symptom Index (NIH-CPSI). Response to treatment was defined as a minimum six-point decrease from baseline to week ten in NIH-CPSI total score - bear with me! 73% participants responded in the acupuncture group compared with 47% of sham participants (shallower needling - see above and below). This level of response was maintained 24 weeks after completing therapy by 32% of the acupuncture group, as compared to 13% of the sham group. Participants receiving acupuncture were thus 2.4-fold more likely to experience long-term benefit than were participants receiving sham acupuncture.
However, new functional MRI scans show that both deep and superficial needling of acupuncture points appear to elicit similar responses in the brain. Functional MRI scans of the brain show its functions in three dimensions in real time - essentially a holographic movie of how a brain is working. In this new study, volunteers were needled either superficially or deeply at an acupuncture point on the hand. For the faint-hearted, when I say deep here it is meant as relative to very shallow, and doesn't imply pinning the patient to the couch! As the point was needled their brains underwent fMRI scanning, which calculates the activity of brain regions by measuring oxygen uptake by the tissues. Computer gadgetry then shows brain activity in different colours, to show which bits are active, and which are asleep. The result of both types of needling was that deactivation of brain regions predominated over activation. No significant differences in signal responses were seen between the two needling methods. This is consistent with the equivelent therapeutic outcomes that are reported by practitioners of Japanese and Chinese styles of acupuncture that utilise superficial and deep needling, respectively. As noted above, it also calls into question the use of superficial needling as a control in acupuncture studies.
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