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. 2014 Sep 15:14:336.
doi: 10.1186/1472-6882-14-336.

Acupuncture on GB34 activates the precentral gyrus and prefrontal cortex in Parkinson's disease

Sujung Yeo, Il-Hwan Choe, Maurits van den Noort, Peggy Bosch, Geon-Ho Jahng, Bruce Rosen, Sung-Hoon Kim, Sabina Lim  1
Affiliations

Acupuncture on GB34 activates the precentral gyrus and prefrontal cortex in Parkinson's disease

Sujung Yeo et al. BMC Complement Altern Med. .

Abstract

Background: Acupuncture is increasingly used as an additional treatment for patients with Parkinson's disease (PD).

Methods: In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, brain activation in response to acupuncture in a group of 12 patients with PD was compared with a group of 12 healthy participants. Acupuncture was conducted on a specific acupoint, the right GB 34 (Yanglingquan), which is a frequently used acupoint for motor function treatment in the oriental medical field.

Results: Acupuncture stimulation on this acupoint activates the prefrontal cortex, precentral gyrus, and putamen in patients with PD; areas that are known to be impaired in patients with PD. Compared with healthy participants, patients with PD showed significantly higher brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and precentral gyrus, especially visible in the left hemisphere.

Conclusions: The neuroimaging results of our study suggest that in future acupuncture research; the prefrontal cortex as well as the precentral gyrus should be treated for symptoms of Parkinson's disease and that GB 34 seems to be a suitable acupoint. Moreover, acupuncture evoked different brain activations in patients with Parkinson's disease than in healthy participants in our study, stressing the importance of conducting acupuncture studies on both healthy participants as well as patients within the same study, in order to detect acupuncture efficacy.

Trial registration: KCT0001122 at cris.nih.go.kr (registration date: 20140530).

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Brain activation among healthy participants and patients with PD during acupuncture stimulation and sham stimulation (one-sample t -test; with corrected cluster level P  < 0.05). The bar is the t value.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Volume of areas activated by ACUP and SHAM. ‘A’ is for the precentral gyrus and ‘B’ is for the prefrontal cortex (paired-t test; *P < 0.05).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Common areas activated on both patients with PD and healthy participants during ACUP and SHAM. Left graph shows the significant difference in common region volume activated by ACUP and SHAM. *P < 0.005.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Pre-publication history
    1. The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here:http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/14/336/prepub

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