Preliminary Correlation Between Warm Needling Treatment for Knee Osteoarthritis of Deficiency-Cold Syndrome and Metabolic Functional Genes and Pathways

Abstract

The warm needling technique used in traditional Chinese medicine has been shown to be effective in the treatment and prevention of knee osteoarthritis (OA), but the biological mechanisms behind this action have not been well explored. This study investigated the molecular mechanisms behind warm needling using cDNA microarray technology, thus providing further scientific evidence for its efficacy. Ten patients with knee OA of deficiency-cold syndrome were selected for 2 weeks of warm needling treatment. This treatment involved stimulating the selected acupoints using needles with a burning moxa stick on their handle for 40 minutes per session. Pain intensity and accumulated clinical scores of deficiency-cold syndrome were assessed pretreatment and posttreatment using a 40-factor questionnaire of OA with deficiency-cold syndrome. Four patients with the best therapeutic efficacy were selected for cDNA microarray testing. Among the four patients, 41, 246, 57 and 70 differentially expressed genes were obtained, with more than 50% of these differentially expressed genes functionally linked to primary, cellular and energy metabolism pathways. This work demonstrates that the molecular mechanism behind warm needling treatment may be associated with the regulation of metabolism-related genes and pathways.

Understanding Acupuncture Based on ZHENG Classification from System Perspective

“…Omics studies on the acupuncture effects on Parkinson's disease [21, 22, 25, 26], rhinitis [24, 27], osteoarthritis [28], spinal injury [29, 30], pain [18, 19, 23, 25], aging [31, 32], ischemia (ischemic stroke) [33, 34], parturition [35] functional dyspepsia [36, 37], and so forth indicated that the mechanism of acupuncture is involved in the regulation of many body systems and is mainly associated with NEI system (Figure 1). The nerve, endocrine, and immune systems are distributed over the body widely.…”

A review of Omics research in acupuncture: The relevance and future prospects for understanding the nature of meridians and acupoints

“…The genome-wide changes of gene expression following acupuncture/moxibustion treatment have been primarily profiled in models of Parkinson's Disease (Hong et al, 2010;Choi et al, 2011a,b), allergic disorder (Shiue et al, 2008(Shiue et al, , 2010Sohn et al, 2010;Tan et al, 2010), spinal cord injury (SCI) , EA analgesia (Ko et al, 2002;Chae et al, 2006;Gao et al, 2007), hypercholesterolemia (Kang et al, 2007a;Li and Zhang, 2007), aging (Yu et al, 2005;Ding et al, 2006) and cerebral ischemia (Guo et al, 2004). The microarrays of either cDNA or oligonucleotide probes (Gao et al, 2007) were used to screen for potential candidate genes to mediate acupuncture responses.…”

“…In most reports, the expression levels of identified targets were subsequently verified by real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). Reports using samples from both animal models and patients (Chae et al, 2006;Shiue et al, 2008Shiue et al, , 2010Tan et al, 2010) are included in this review. Clinical scoring by questionnaires or symptom checklists was used to measure pre-and post-acupuncture effects and psychological variation for human subjects (Chae et al, 2006;Tan et al, 2010).…”

Systems Biology of Meridians, Acupoints, and Chinese Herbs in Disease

“…Tan et al compared the transcriptional profiles of four patients stimulated at the CV4, CV6, ST36, EX32, and GB34 acupoints [45]. They collected samples from the peripheral blood of patients after acupuncture treatments.…”

“…We found that the ST36 acupoint is the most widely used acupoints, and that it has multiple therapeutic functions and targets, including spinal cord injury [46], allergic rhinitis [56], analgesia [38], neuropathic pain [9, 47], antiaging [41], knee osteoarthritis [45], and acute ischemic stroke [11]. Different from other therapies, acupuncture treatments show variation in the transcriptional profiles and perceived effect of their subjects, whether rats [39] or humans [40].…”