- South Korean researchers say that acupuncture, a traditional
Chinese medicine technique of inserting and manipulating needles
into various points on the body, may be effective in treating the
type of brain inflammation suffered by patients with Parkinson's
disease.
Lead researcher Sabina Lim at Kyung Hee University in Seoul and her
colleagues used a standard mouse model of Parkinson's disease, in
which injections of a chemical known as MPTP kill off brain cells
that manufacture dopamine.

Some of the injected mice were then administered acupuncture every
two days in two spots, one behind the knee and one on top of the
foot, the points which in humans could potentially be seen as
targets for treatment of Parkinson's.

Another group of mice received acupuncture in two spots on the hips,
not believed to be effective for acupuncture, while a third group
had no acupuncture at all.

By the end of seven days, the MPTP injections had decreased dopamine
levels both in the mice that not receiving acupuncture, and those
who received it to about half the normal amount. But in the
acupuncture-treated group, dopamine levels declined much less
steeply, and nearly 80 per cent of the dopamine remained.

Lim says that the mechanism behind this effect is still unknown, but
she and her team suspect that because inflammation in the brain
often accompanies and worsens other symptoms of Parkinson's disease,
acupuncture might maintain dopamine levels by preventing
inflammation.

They have already performed a clinical trial of acupuncture in
humans with Parkinson's disease, but the sample size was not large
enough to verify that there was a definite effect.

"The bottom line," Nature magazine quoted Lim as saying, "is that,
even though Parkinson's patients are treated with acupuncture
therapies in Korea, it is difficult to say that it can 'cure' the
disease."

Ruth Walker, a movement disorders researcher at the Mount Sinai
School of Medicine in New York City, said that using acupuncture to
treat Parkinson's would also mean diagnosing the disease early
enough.

"Parkinson's doesn't even manifest until you have lost a large
proportion of dopamine cells," she said.

London, 1/23/07(Daily India News)