In a new research it is found that the needle pricks that are involved in acupuncture can help to ease pain by stimulating a natural painkiller chemical known as adenosine in the body. The study researchers believe that they can augment the effectiveness of acupuncture by pairing the process with cancer drug called deoxycoformycin, which sustains level of adenosine longer than usual.
In the study, carried out in mice by Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues performed acupuncture treatment to group with paw discomfort for half-hour. Adenosine is well known for having anti-inflammatory properties and to help regulate sleep and ease pain. They found that adenosine level near the needle insertion point was twenty-four time greater after treatment.
Those mice with normal adenosine receptor practiced drop in paw pain by two-third. However mice that were genetically engineered to have no adenosine receptor gained no befits from the treatment. They also found that by activating adenosine in same tissue areas without applying acupuncture, the discomfort of mice was reduced equally that showed the magic of adenosine behind the method.
In their experiments they showed that effects of acupuncture were enhanced by a cancer drug called deoxycoformycin that makes it hard for tissue to remove adenosine. The composite nearly tripled the accretion of adenosine in the muscles and more than tripled the amount of time the treatment was effective.
Acupuncture had been a mainstay of medical treatment in certain parts of the world for four-thousand years, but because it had not been understood completely, many people had remained skeptical, explained lead author Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuro-medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Their new work would provide information about one corporeal device through which acupuncture reduced pain in the body.