Purpose: To study the mechanism of early acupuncture treatment in resisting inflammatory injury in cerebral ischemia reperfusion (IR) rats. Methods: A total of 120 Wistar rats were randomly divided into normal control,sham operation, model and EA groups, and each of them were further divided into IR 12 hr, IR 24 hr and IR 48 hr subgroups, with 10 cases being in each subgroup. Cerebral ischemia was produced by occlusion of the middle cerebral artery for 0.5 hr. Shuigou (GV 26) and Baihui (GV 20) were punctured and stimulated electrically with an EA therapeutic apparatus. Serum IL 1β and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) α contents were assayed by using radioimmunoassay. Results: Results showed that serum IL 1β and TNF α contents of model group were significantly higher than those of normal control and sham operation groups at IR 12 hr, 24 hr and 48 hr (P<0.05), meaning that following IR, the production and release of these two cytokines in the blood increased obviously; comparison between EA and model groups displayed that serum IL 1β and TNF α levels of EA group were strikingly lower than those of model group (P<0.01), suggesting that EA stimulation can suppress IR induced increase of production and release of these two cytokines. Conclusion: EA can suppress cerebral IR induced increase of serum IL 1β and TNF α, which may contribute to the effect of acupuncture in resisting cerebral IR injury in the treatment of stroke.
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