By Staff Writer - December, 5th 2013

The high morbidity, prevalence, and disability rates of neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs), especially Alzheimer’s disease (AD)—the most common of all NDDs, with limited effective therapies, make it necessary to pay attention to alternative therapies, such as acupuncture. In fact, in the East Asian countries such as China and Korea, the practice of acupuncture for treating NDDs dates long back and continues to be popular in modern day clinical practice. There has been some progress in clinical and experimental studies on acupuncture therapy for NDDs.

An increasing number of clinical and animal studies have confirmed that acupuncture is effective for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease.

Moxibustion is reported to be more effective than electro-acupuncture for improving space-recognizing memory ability in aged mice, suggesting that moxibustion is another alternative or complementary therapy used to treat Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Yanjun Du and team from Hubei University of Chinese Medicine, China only used suspended moxibustion (also named warming moxibustion, scarring moxibustion, or herb-partition moxibustion) on Baihui (GV20) and Shenshu (BL23) acupoints to observe the action of pre-moxibustion on preventing apoptosis in a rat model of Alzheimer's disease.

The pre-moxibustion group was treated with moxibustion for eight courses (each course lasting for 6 days) prior to the exposure and 14 days after A?1–42 exposure. Results showed no evidence of apoptosis in hippocampal neurons, a significantly reduced apoptosis rate of neurons and improved learning and memory …

 

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