Electroacupuncture Pretreatment as a Novel Avenue to Protect Heart against Ischemia and Reperfusion Injury.

Electroacupuncture Pretreatment as a Novel Avenue to Protect Heart against Ischemia and Reperfusion Injury.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2020;2020:9786482
Authors: Zhang J, Zhu L, Li H, Tang Q
Abstract
In recent years, the efficacy of electroacupuncture (EA) pretreatment generating ischemic tolerance mimicking ischemic pretreatment (IP) has been continuously confirmed, which was first found in the brain and then in the heart. Furthermore, researchers have observed the intensive cardioprotection impact of EA pretreatment on patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and heart valve replacement, indicating that EA pretreatment tends to be a valuable and advantageous avenue for preventing acute myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury or treatment of ischemic heart disease (IHD). In reality, the heart protection mechanism of EA pretreatment is robust and pleiotropic, of which the regulatory molecular pathways are involved in multichannel, multilevel, and multitarget, including energy metabolism, inflammatory response, calcium overload, oxidative stress, autophagy, and apoptosis. Through a growing number of clinical tests and basic experiments with animal models, researchers progressively explored the optimal acupoints and parameters, where EA pretreatment induced acute and delayed ischemic tolerance for myocardial protection. Thereby, this article aims to collect the relevant evidence on EA pretreatment agai...

Source: Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine - June 9, 2020 Category: Complementary Medicine Tags: Evid Based Complement Alternat Med Source Type: research