Elsevier

Autonomic Neuroscience

Volume 186, December 2014, Pages 91-94
Autonomic Neuroscience

Short communication
Neurons in the nucleus tractus solitarius mediate the acupuncture analgesia in visceral pain rats

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autneu.2014.08.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Somato-visceral convergent neurons in the NTS respond to both CRD and acupuncture stimulations.

  • CRD related NTS neurons show multiple firing patterns.

  • Acupuncture may reverse responses of some CRD related neurons in the NTS.

  • The effect of acupuncture has no somatic locational discrepancy.

  • The acupuncture analgesia of CRD relays on polysynaptic connections in the NTS.

Abstract

The study investigated the role of nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) neurons in electroacupuncture (EA) analgesia in colorectal distension (CRD) rats. NTS neurons responding to both CRD test and EA conditioning stimulations were considered somato-visceral convergent neurons. The neuronal activities evoked by graded CRD showed multiple firing patterns indicating multisynaptic connections. Some of the CRD excitatory neurons were inhibited by EA and vice versa. There was no discrepancy among different acupoints in inducing the changes of unit discharges. Conclusively, EA could regulate CRD related neurons in the NTS through polysynaptic cross-talk mechnism, which mediates EA analgesia on visceral pain in anesthetized rats.

Section snippets

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81130063, 81173345) to Bing Zhu and Xin-Yan Gao respectively, and the National Basic Research Program grants (2011CB505201) to Bing Zhu. The authors thank Professor Haifa Qiao in Florida State University College of Medicine for his critical reading and word polishing.

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      In turn, the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS), in addition to vagal gastrointestinal inputs, is reported to receive afferents from a visceral processing region of the lumbosacral spinal cord (Gamboa-Esteves et al., 2001, 2004; Wang et al., 1999) and may thus obtain nociceptive information from the colon and rectum via the vagal and spinosolitary pathways. Supporting data are provided by studies, including ours, showing that noxious distension of the proximal colon or the colorectal region induces specific patterns of neuronal activity and c-Fos expression in the both medullary areas mentioned above (Liu et al., 2014; Lyubashina et al., 2012, 2016; Lyubashina and Sivachenko, 2017; Martínez et al., 2006; Mönnikes et al., 2003; Ness et al., 1998, 1999; Panteleev et al., 2013, 2015b; Pinto-Ribeiro et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2009). However, it is not yet known if the CVLM and NTS equally contribute to abdominal pain processing and whether the response properties of nociceptive neurons in these structures change in case of intestinal inflammation.

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