Herbal Medicine: Open Access

The Therapeutic Effect of Acupuncture Treatment on Chronic Inflammation of High Fat Diet Induced Rats

Objective: Obesity may be viewed as a chronic low-grade inflammatory disease, and there are increasing evidences proved that the acupuncture has the effect of anti-obesity; here we explored the therapeutic effect of acupuncture treatment on chronic Inflammation of high fat diet induced rats.

Methods: Use the high fat diet to induced obesity rats, and treat the rats with specific acupoints acupuncture and non-acupoints acupuncture. After the interference, all the rats were exposure to CO₂ atmosphere and were killed by decapitation, the epididymis fat and the perirenal fat were isolated and weighted, and measured the serum level of FFA, TG, TC, IL-6 and TNFα.

Results. The highfat-diet induced rats had heavier body weight, epididymal and perirenal fat pad weight, and higher level of FFA, TC, TG, IL-6 and TNFα level in serum than the normal control group fed with standard chow. The specific acupoints and nonacupoints acupuncture treatment has the effect of significantly reducing body weight, epididymal and perirenal fat pad weight and serum FFA, TC, TG, IL-6 and TNFα. Compare the specific acupoints and non-acupoints acupuncture treatment, the body weight, and epididymal and perirenal fat pad weight in specific acupoints treatment group lower than the non-acupoints treatment group, however there is no significant difference of serum FFA, TC, TG, IL-6 and TNFα.

Conclusion: The specific acupoints (St 25, St 36, Sp6, P6 and St 40) acupuncture treatment have remarkable effect of anti-obesity and its mechanism may related to down-regulating the concentration of serum FFAs, IL-6 and TNFα.

Author(s):

Meng Xia, Ling-Feng Jiang, Dan-Dan Chen, Zhao-Yang Zhang, Hong-Teng Huang, Mei Liang, Jia Liu and Hong-Zhen Tang

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