| Background:The quality of daily life of migraine patients has been seriously influenced by the repeated migraine attacks and it’s ubiquitous sleep disorders. Thus, to study the mechanisms of migraine and it’s therapeutic treatments are of great importance. A large number of clinical studies have demonstrated that acupuncture is effective in treating migraine and the practical guidelines of acupuncture for migraine has also been established recently. In the past decades, with the fast development of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), significant improvements have been made in the field of researches on the mechanisms of diseases and acupuncture treatment.Objective:In the current study, we designed an fMRI research on migraine without aura (MWoA) with healthy subjects as control to detect the specified abnormal changes in the default mode network (DMN) of MWoA. We also tried to detect the modulatory effects of acupuncture on the DMN of MWoA patients by conducting an acupuncture treating course of four weeks.Methods:A total of10MWoA patients and another10age-and gender-matched healthy control (HC) subjects were recruited in the current study. An acupuncture treating course of four weeks was conducted on the MWoA patients according to the practical guidelines. The MWoA patients received resting state fMRI scanning before and after the acupuncture treatment respectively while the HC subjects received only one resting state fMRI scanning as control. Severing as one of the most important and meaningful resting state brain functional network, the DMN was selected as the key point of our research. We tried to explore the abnormal functional connectivity (FC) changes of brain regions involved in the DMN using independent component analysis (ICA). The specified abnormal changes in the DMN of MWoA patients were explored with the contrast between the FC of MWoA patients before acupuncture treatment and that of the HC subjects. The modulatory effects of acupuncture on the DMN of MWoA patients were explored with the contrast between the FC of MWoA patients after acupuncture treatment and that of the HC subjects and between the FC of MWoA patients before and after acupuncture treatment.Results:The contrast between the FC of MWoA patients before acupuncture treatment and that of the HC subjects showed that the bilateral cingulate gyrus (CG), precuneus (PC), inferior parietal lobule (IPL), medial frontal gyrus (MPG), temporal gyrus (TG) and some other brain regions overlapping the DMN revealed significantly decreased FC in MWoA patients compared with HC subjects. The contrast between the FC of MWoA patients after acupuncture treatment and before showed that the bilateral cingulate gyrus (CG), precuneus (PC), inferior parietal lobule (IPL), medial frontal gyrus (MPG), temporal gyrus (TG) and some orther brain regions revealed increased FC in MWoA patients after acupuncture treatment when comparing with that before. And the contrast between the FC of MWoA patients after acupuncture treatment and that of the HC subjects showed that the aforementioned brain regions still revealed decreased FC in MWoA patients compared with HC subjects. However, the extent of the decrease was much smaller.Conclusion:The results of the current study demonstrated that there are certain specified abnormal changes in the DMN of MWoA patients which turned to be decreased FC in the bilateral cingulate gyrus (CG), precuneus (PC), inferior parietal lobule (IPL), medial frontal gyrus (MPG), temporal gyrus (TG) and some orther brain regions of the DMN. The results also indicated that acupuncture treatment could modulate the specified abnormal changes of the DMN in MWoA patients by regulating it to normal. The results presented here could serve as a possible neuro-imaging interpretation of the mechanisms of migraine and the mechanisms of the effect of acupuncture. However, we have to admit that there still many limitations in our study and further studies with high quality and techniques are still in need to confirm our results. |
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