Clinical Studies Of Acupuncture Treatment Of Vascular Dementia

ObjectiveTo probe the effect of using acupuncture to treating the intellectual disorder of patients who suffered from vascular dementia. According to the principle of replenishing kidney recipe and xing nao kai qiao of tradition Chinese medicine, through studying the change of the content of TXB2 and 6-Keto-PGF1α in blood, the change in encephalic MRI and the change of intelligence of patients before and after treating by using acupuncture and nimodipine to probe the mechanism of acupuncture treating vascular dementia and prove that acupuncture is a kind of efficient method in treating vascular dementia.MethodsAll the 61 in-patients who come from Acupuncture and Moxibustion and Cerebral physical Department of the First Hospital in Wuhan and Cerebral physical Department of the161st hospital of PLA, according to history syndrome and physical examination and the standard of DSM-IV and Haschinski about vascular dementia disease, were divided into two groups, acupuncture group and drug group. The acupuncture group included 31 cases and the drug group included 30 cases too. In the acupuncture group, we selected BAI HUI through SI SHEN CONG point, FENG CHI(double), QU CHI(double), ZU SAN LI(double), JUE GU(double), SHUI GOU. In the drug group, nimodipine was used 30 mg three times a day. Every patient was treated thirty days. At the same time, we measured changes in encephalic MRI, the scores of MMSE, HDS, ADL and nerve dysfunction score of every patient before and after treatment. In addition, we checked the change of the content of relevant biochemical indicators, TXB2 and 6-Keto-PGF1 α in blood.Results1. The acupuncture group effective rates is 87.1 % but the drug group is 66.7%, The acupuncture, group effective rates is obviously higher than the drug group. There is a significant difference between the two groups (P < 0.05).2. The two groups scores of MMSE, HDS and ADL are all increased, while the score in nerve dysfunction decreased.Comparing the change of every item in the acupuncture group and the drug group, we can find a significant difference between the two groups especially the change of PIQ and the performance scores (P < 0.05).3. There is no obvious change in encephalic MRI in the two groups and there is not significant difference between the two groups (P > 0.05).4. The content of TXB2 in the both groups are obviously dropped but which of 6-Keto-PGF1 α are increased. The changes in the acupuncture group are more obvious. Compared with which of the drug group, there is a very significantdifference in the two indicators (P < 0.05). Conclusions1. This kind of acupuncture method can treat vascular dementia disease efficiently and improvement the intelligence of the patients suffered from intellectual disorder disease. The effect of acupuncture is superior to which of nimodipine in short time.2. Acupuncture can increase the content of 6-Keto-PGF1 α and decrease the content of TXB2 in blood, which is probably the mechanism of acupuncture for VD.3. Acupuncture therapy can not ameliorate encephalic MRI probably because of the time not being long enough. On the other hand, it indicates that the improvement of intelligence is not caused by amelioration of encephalic microscope patter but probably by the complement of the other normal encephalic organs.4. As a kind of cheap, convenient and efficient method for VD and with certain practicable worth for society, acupuncture therapy should be used in clinic for this disease widely.