Liuyue Yang, Weihua Ding, Yuanlin Dong, Cynthia Chen, Yanru Zeng, Zhangjie Jiang, Shuyuan Gan, Zerong You, Yilin Zhao, Yiying Zhang, Xinghua Ren, Shiyu Wang, Jiajia Dai, Zhong Chen, Shengmei Zhu, Lucy Chen, Shiqian Shen, Jianren Mao, Zhongcong Xie
Surgical pain is associated with delirium in patients, and acupuncture can treat pain. However, whether electroacupuncture can attenuate the surgical pain-associated delirium via the gut-brain axis remains unknown. Leveraging a mouse model of foot incision-induced surgical pain and delirium-like behavior, we found that electroacupuncture stimulation at specific acupoints (e.g., DU20+KI1) attenuated both surgical pain and delirium-like behavior in mice. Mechanistically, mice with incision-induced surgical pain and delirium-like behavior showed gut microbiota imbalance, microglia activation in the spinal cord, somatosensory cortex, and hippocampus, as well as an enhanced dendritic spine elimination in cortex revealed by two-photon imaging...
2022: Frontiers in Immunology