Research On Acupuncture Induced Recovery Mechanism Of Bell's Palsy Based On Functional MRI

Bell's palsy(BP)is a common facial nerve-lesioned disease characterized with the abnormality of facial features and uncontrolled facial muscle activities.The basic pathogenesis is that impaired efferent nerve,which results from facial edema,leads to the inability of neural circuits of performing facial movements.However,the factor causing the edema is still vague.As an important part of Chinese traditional medicine,acupuncture is frequently used for treatment of BP.Even though there are still some arguments on the mechanism of acupuncture,the curative effect of acupuncture treatment has been verified clinically.Hegu acupoint(L14)is often used for clinical acupuncture treatment of BP.At present,Hegu acupoint on the contralateral side of the palsy is always selected as the primary acupoint,but the ipsilateral Hegu point can also be chosen in some cases.However,it has not been verified whether the efficacy of acupuncture at contralateral is different from that of acupuncture at ipsilateral Hegu points.Therefore,this study aimed to investigate this issue by studying the connectivity changes of primary somatosensory cortex(SI)induced by acupuncturing at the ipsilateral and contralateral Hegu acupoints of BP patients with the help of fMRI.Two experimental groups and one control group were involved in the study and the fMRI data of the resting-state and the task-state were both acquired for both groups.The seed region was calculated from the task-state fMRI data of the control group and the location of SI was accordingly acquired.Based on the data of before and after acupuncture,the functional connectivity of SI was calculated and compared.The results showed significant functional connectivity changes in the contralateral acupoint groups,and no significant alterations in both the ipsilateral acupoint groups and the healthy control groups.Therefore,we discussed the connectivity altered regions in depth in this research.Via using the difference test,the intergroup analysis was applied in this experiment.The result suggested that there was a significant difference in SI connectivity alteration between the contralateral group and the ipsilateral group.Accordingly,we also hypothesized a possible mechanism for treating Bell's palsy via acupuncture.