Effect And Mechanism Of Preventive Moxibustion On Adjuvant Arthritis(AA)

"Preventive moxibustion", called nijiu in Chinese, is a commonly used preventive method in Chinese medicine. It refers to stimulation of qi and blood within the meridians when a person is healthy or his condition is mild, the self-healing force and stress ability within the body will be strengthened so that health protection or alleviation of diseases and disorders could be achieved. Profuse researches have validated that preventive moxibustion is an effective way for prevention or alleviation of illness and prolonging one's life, but its mechanism is still unknown.It has been proved in modern medicine that the human body has an endogenous adaptability. Much attention has be paid to make the body engender appropriate endogenous adaptability by pretreatment in order to prevent from onset of illness or alleviate one's condition. The advantage of this preventive method is to arouse the endogenous healing force rather than supply exogenous substances to protect health. Pretreatment in this way is a holistic interference method, it mobilizes and promotes one's inherent healing force as much as possible. Acupuncture and moxibustion just has such an advantage for healthy protection and treatment of diseases. Preventive moxibustion is similar to pretreatment methods in modern medicine. According to modern stress theory, the hypothesis of preventive beneficial stress induced by acupuncture and moxibustion (针灸良性预应激假说) is put forward in this article based upon the effect of preventive moxibustion on prevention or alleviation of illness.A great deal researches show that those who are ill or even healthy may have various degrees of immunological dysfunction or inflammation. It has been proved that acupuncture and moxibustion can effectively relieve inflammation and regulate immunological function. This is the basis that acupuncture and moxibustion is effective for treatment of various kinds of immunological disorders and both acute and chronic inflammatory conditions. And it is also the reason that why acupuncture and moxibustion can be used for treatment of tumors, infections and allergic reaction, as well as for prevention of ills and delaying ageing. Now the question is that, when a person is healthy, whether or not preventive moxibustion could stimulate the body to engender beneficial stress and induce a series of responses to enhance one's adaptability and resistance , so that the body will adapt to harmful stress successfully and prevent from or alleviate the diseases and disorders.A primary experiment was designed to validate this hypothesis. An animalmodel of adjuvant arthritis (AA) was made with Freunds Complete Adjuvant (FCA). It is an ideal model to demonstrate immunol -ogical dysfunction and inflammatory reaction. Moxibustion was applied to the mice's DU14-Dazhui in advance. A lot advanced techniques such as immunohistochemistry, histopathology, radio- immunity, biochemistry and computer image analysis were applied to investigate both histological and chemical changes of the animal model during the early and secondary stages, and explore the mechanism of protective action induced by preventive moxibustion. The items observed included corticotropinreleas- inghormone (CRH), 3 -endorphin, 3 -EP, stress protein (HSP70), superoxide dismutase (SOD), Malonic aldehyde (MDA) and Nuclear Transcription Factor (NF- k. B).Main conclusions are as following:1. FCA could induce typical histopathological change of joint tissues, swelling of the joints, increase of inflammatory cells, and depression of the activity of IL-2 in the spleen. But when FCA was applied after preventive moxibustion, the histopathological change and swollen feet during the early and secondary stages could be alleviated obviously, the excessive increase of inflammatory cells was reduced, and the activity of IL-2 inhibited by AA recovered to some extent. The changes became obvious during the secondary stage. These findings indicate that, although preventive moxibustion could not hold back the course of AA, it could delay and alleviate...