Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 424762, 1 page
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/424762

Editorial

Acupuncture and Oxidative Stress

Cun-Zhi Liu,¹ Shu-Feng Zhou,² Sergio-Botelho Guimarães,³ William Chi-shing Cho,⁴ and Guang-Xia Shi¹

¹Acupuncture and Moxibustion Department, Beijing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine Affiliated to Capital Medical University, 23 Meishuguanhou Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing 100010, China
²Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of South Florida, 12901 Bruce B. Downs Boulevard, Tampa, FL 33612, USA
³Department of Surgery, Federal University of Ceara (UFC), 60430-140 Fortaleza, CE, Brazil
⁴Department of Clinical Oncology, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Hong Kong

Received 29 October 2014; Accepted 29 October 2014

Copyright © 2015 Cun-Zhi Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The current special issue is the 2014 issue which includes 7 interesting papers.

As one of the modalities of traditional oriental medicine, acupuncture has been widely used to treat many disorders and diseases including chronic pain, stroke, and insomnia as well as depression, while its mechanisms remain unclear. Enhanced production of reactive oxygen species causes oxidative stress leading to damage in lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. Recent experimental studies have demonstrated that acupuncture could attenuate oxidative stress, which seems possible to explore the physiological antioxidative mechanism of acupuncture in various diseases.

This special issue contains 7 papers, of which 5 articles study the antioxidative mechanism of acupuncture in some diseases by animal models. These studies suggested that acupuncture may result from antioxidation, anti-inflammation, and antiapoptosis effects in several kinds of diseases. Among these, one study is related to the effect of laser acupuncture on memory impairment, oxidative stress status, and the functions of both cholinergic and dopaminergic systems in hippocampus of animal model of Parkinson’s disease. One study explores whether electroacupuncture reduces myocardial ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury and inflammatory responses through inhibiting early growth response (Egr)-1 expression via the extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase-1 and kinase-2 (ERK1/2) pathway in a mouse model of myocardial ischemia reperfusion. Besides, one study compares the effects of antioxidant interventions on the electrical potential difference between acupoints along the stomach meridian on human. This paper suggests a possible underlying mechanism of acupuncture involving superoxide removal. One study focuses on the emerging links between acupuncture and redox modulation in vascular dementia, Alzheimer’s vascular dementia, Parkinson’s disease and hypertension, which represents an important step forward in the research of acupuncture antioxidative effect.

We are excited to explore the studies on the specific oxidative stress biomarkers and redox signaling cascades using oxidative stress-related assessments techniques should be particularly useful in generating new hypotheses to enhance our understanding of the mechanism of antioxidative effects of acupuncture.

Cun-Zhi Liu
Shu-Feng Zhou
Sergio-Botelho Guimarães
William Chi-shing Cho
Guang-Xia Shi