Scalp Acupuncture for the Treatment of Motor Function in Acute Spinal Cord Injury: A Case Report.

An acute spinal cord injury is the result of a traumatic injury to the spinal cord caused by a contusion, compression, or severing of the spinal cord. There are approximately 17,000 new cases each year, of which, males account for 80%. Approximately 65% of these injuries cause incomplete or partial damage to the spinal cord. Comprehensive treatment is essential to restore maximum function. Surgical procedures, stem cell therapy, pharmaceutical agents, and physical therapy are employed to minimize and repair damage done to the nervous system. The majority of motor and sensory recovery occurs during the first 12 to 15 weeks after the injury. Acupuncture has shown promising results in mediating neural plasticity and could be a useful treatment modality in hospital and rehabilitation settings. This case presents the treatment of an acute spinal cord injury, level T5, incomplete, with scalp acupuncture both within and beyond the optimal recovery window. The treatments given within the optimal window seemed to facilitate better restoration of nervous system communication when performing specific action.

[Teaching design of mastering scalp acupuncture fast].

Scalp acupuncture is a method of treating whole-body diseases. The author takes the easy positioning of scalp acupuncture as starting point, covers the positioning of scalp acupuncture and needle insertion points, acupuncture manipulation and the selection of acupoints, so as to introduce the design of teaching the international standardized scalp acupuncture with texts and illustrations. The positions of scalp acupuncture are 4 lines in frontal area, 5 lines in parietal area, 2 lines in temporal area and 3 lines in occipital area. The needle insertion angle is 30° to the skin. Acupoints can be selected crossly and correspondingly in clinic.

N400-like responses to three-chord harmonic sequences with unexpected out of key endings: scalp topography, cortical sources, and perspectives for a clinical use.

A series of ERP components, each provided with both a precise timing with respect to stimulation and a specific cortical localization, reflects the temporal succession of processing stages of music information. This makes the musical stimulus potentially usable to probe residual brain functions in non-communicating patients with disorders of consciousness. In an attempt to find a simple stimulation protocol that was suitable for use in a clinical setting, the purpose of this study was to verify whether a minimum-length musical stimulus, provided with a definite music-syntactic connotation, was still able to elicit musical ERPs in a group of eight healthy subjects. The stimulus was composed of the minimum number of chords necessary and sufficient to enable the subject to predict a plausible closure of the sequence (priming) and, at the same time, to provide him/her with the closing chord of the sequence (target), either congruous (probable closing) or not (improbable closing) to the tonal context. The subject's task was to discriminate and recognize the irregular targets. The components that were expected to be elicited, in this experimental situation, were ERAN, N5, P600/LPC. Conversely, in addition to these former components, we unexpectedly observed a N400-like component. To determine whether this component was a real N400, we submitted our data to a sLORETA analysis in order to identify its cortical generators. Irregular chords showed higher current densities with respect to regular ones on the right-sided medial and superior temporal gyri, superior and inferior parietal lobules, fusiform and parahippocampal gyri, and on the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex. In particular, the N400-like wave seems to share with the word-primed music-elicited N400 certain generators that are located in cortical areas BA 21/37 and BA 22. This suggests that even chord-primed chord targets can convey extra-musical meanings and that, consequently, they might be useful in assessing residual higher-order information-processing capabilities in non-communicating patients with disorders of consciousness.

[Micro-acupuncture system in the hairline region of the scalp].

Studying on the acupoints in the hairline region of the scalp, it is discovered that a group of acupoints are orderly arranged in the hairline region of the scalp. Furthermore, the arrangement is highly consistent with the meridian route of zang-fu organs. Manipulating needles at acupoints in the hairline regions of the scalp may treat certain diseases, including insomnia, migraine, and Alzheimer disease. The characteristics of the acupuncture treatment at acupoints in the hairline of scalp resemble the characteristics of ear acupuncture and eye acupuncture. Thus forms a special micro-acupuncture system in the hairline regions of the scalp. This paper states the theoretical basis, the arrangement of acupoints, clinical application and operating norms.

[Brief analysis on scientifity of the international scalp acupuncture].

By comparing and analyzing the similarity among the international scalp acupuncture, JIAO's scalp acupuncture and ZHU's scalp acupuncture, it is believed that the international scalp acupuncture is a combination of traditional acupuncture and other scalp acupuncture on the basis of channel theory of TCM, and this combination is worthy of discussion. However JIAO's scalp acupuncture lacks scientific evidence. So, the international scalp acupuncture following most contents of JIAO's scalp acupuncture is worthy of discussion.

Left-hemisphere dominance for processing of vowels: a whole-scalp neuromagnetic study.

Brain activation of 11 healthy right-handed subjects was studied with magnetoencephalography to estimate individual hemispheric dominance for speech sounds. The auditory stimuli comprised binaurally presented Finnish vowels, tones, and piano notes in groups of two or four stimuli. The subjects were required to detect whether the first and the last item in a group were the same. In the left hemisphere, vowels evoked significantly stronger (37-79%) responses than notes and tones, whereas in the right hemisphere the responses to different stimuli did not differ significantly. Specifically, in the two-stimulus task, all 11 subjects showed left-hemisphere dominance in the vowel vs tone comparison. This simple paradigm may be helpful in non-invasive evaluation of language lateralization.

Comparison of auditory P300 habituation from active and passive conditions.

The P3(00) event-related brain potential (ERP) was elicited using auditory stimuli and tasks in which the subject discriminated between standard and target tones or with passive task conditions in which the subject did not respond to either the standard or target stimuli. All stimulus presentations consisted of a series of ten-tone sequences in which the first six tones were always the standard and one of the last four tones was the target. The passive tasks were presented twice to assess for habituation effects. P3 amplitude was largest for the oddball task compared to the passive tasks, and repetition of the passive paradigm demonstrated a decrease in amplitude between conditions. P3 amplitude did not decrease across trials within any of the separate response conditions. P3 latency was shorter for the active discrimination relative to the passive tasks. The results suggest that the P3 component can be obtained reliably with passive procedures and does not habituate within a trial block. However, repeated blocks of passive stimulus presentations will cause the P3 ERP to diminish in size.

[The surface anatomic observation of cerebral porecentral and postcentral gyrus for scalp acupuncture].

10 heads of adult cadaver were used for investigation of the motor and sensory area of scalp acupuncture. The results are as follows: both the surface anatomy of precentral and postcentral gyrus were not exactly match with the motor and sensory area described in acupuncture textbook respectively. They were backward. Among them, the upper points were 0.5cm backward to motor area and 1.0cm to sensory area, the lower point of precentral gyrus was 1.0cm posterior to the intersecting point of the eyebrow--occiput line and the anterior border of the natural line of the hair at the temple, while the lower point of postcentral gyrus is 2.4cm posterior to the intersecting point above described. Therefore, the authors suggested that the motor and sensory area of the scalp acupuncture should be backward and recommended: take the point 1.0cm and 3.0cm posterior to the midpoint of anteroposterior midline as the upper point of motor and sensory area respectively, 1.0cm and 2.0cm posterior to the intersecting point above described as the lower point respectively. In this way, the motor and sensory areas are better matched with precentral and posrcentral gyrus than before (P < 0.05).