From: Armed with Science

Maj. Dorothy DeLeon, United States Forces-Iraq Red Team member, receives acupuncture for foot problems at a clinic in Baghdad. She is sold on the holistic healing approach to problems she has experienced in her foot and elbow. (Photo by Sgt. Lindsey Kibler)

Military field physicians are using the practice of acupuncture to treat cases of mild traumatic brain injuries (mild TBI), including concussions, and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“We think it’s important to work on these as a team and address both issues at the same time to try to get a Marine back on his feet and heading in the right direction,” said Navy Cmdr. (Dr.) Charlies Benson, a psychiatrist and surgeon with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

Acupuncture, a form of alternative medicine, treats patients by the insertion and manipulation of needles in the body. It has been known to relieve pain, treat infertility and diseases, and prevent diseases.

Operation Stress Control and Readiness Program, a joint Navy-Marine Corps effort, embeds psychiatrists and psychologists within combat teams to provide mental health care to troops in Afghanistan. The program trains medical officers, corpsmen, chaplains, religious personnel and key leaders at the sergeant and first sergeant level to deliver basic mental health services. Troops also have the option to see physical therapists, occupational therapists, and acupuncturists at an outpatient concussion center to address physical and emotional impacts of combat-related injuries.

Having psychiatrists and psychologists embedded in regiments and battalions gives troops who might not naturally turn to a mental health provider a range of ways to seek help, Benson said.

Mild TBI is an especially challenging injury to treat, Bensen said, adding that it is a physical injury, which often includes psychological symptoms including insomnia, headaches, nightmares and anxiety.

“When folks have a mild traumatic brain injury, sometimes their symptoms have a psychiatric flavor,” Bensen said. “They might have difficulty sleeping or nightmares and anxiety along with that.”

As it turns out, PTSD symptoms are very similar to those of mild TBI – insomnia, headaches, memory problems, attention problems, anxiety and irritability. Studies have shown that acupuncture is an effective treatment for PTSD, leading Navy Cmdr. (Dr.) Keith Stuessi, former director of the Concussion Restoration Care Center at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan to believe the treatment could be used for mild TBI as well.

Stuessi describes the Concussion Restoration Care Center as a success – treating more than 320 concussion patients thus far. Of the more than 20 troops he personally treated, almost all saw marked improvements in their sleep, anxiety levels and frequency of headaches. Cmdr. Earl Frantz, who replaced Steussi at Camp Leatherneck in March, continued the practice of using acupuncture on troops with symptoms of mild TBI.

The Department of Defense is putting its weight behind acupuncture. For example, the most recent Veterans Affairs (VA) clinical guidance recommends acupuncture as a supplementary therapy for PTSD, anxiety, pain and sleeplessness. The VA is even recruiting candidates for a formal study of acupuncture’s effectiveness on PTSD and mild TBI.

Link to Source to watch Video Testimonial:
http://www.dodlive.mil/index.php/2011/06/acupuncture-pinpointing-tbi-treatment/

(NaturalNews) A head-on car collision, a stumble that slams your head to the ground, a wound from a military battle in Afghanistan, a violent criminal assault — these and other causes of sudden blows to the head can result in traumatic brain injury (TBI). According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), TBI can be mild, moderate, or severe, depending on the extent of the damage to the brain. And symptoms can range from dizziness, headaches and memory problems to difficulty thinking, coma or even a vegetative state.

Unfortunately, there is no effective medical treatment for TBI. Although doctors can relieve the dangerous swelling that occurs after a traumatic brain injury, there is currently no way to reverse the underlying brain damage that can lead to cognitive losses in memory, learning and other functions. But neuroscientists think that could change, thanks to a natural treatment. A new study recently published in the online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests natural amino acids hold the key to healing brain injuries.

For the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research, neuroscientists fed amino acids to brain-injured mice. The results? The animals’ cognitive abilities were restored. That, the researchers stated in a media release, may set the stage for the first effective treatment for cognitive impairments suffered by people with TBI. If these results from animal studies can be translated to human medicine, the impact will be huge, they added — because every 23 seconds, a man, woman or child in the United States suffers a TBI.

“We have shown in an animal model that dietary intervention can restore a proper balance of neurochemicals in the injured part of the brain, and simultaneously improves cognitive performance,” said study leader Akiva S. Cohen, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a statement to the press.

For their study, the researchers used a mix of three branched chain amino acids (BCAAs), specifically leucine, isoleucine and valine. BCAAs are crucial to brain health because they are precursors of two neurotransmitters — glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA. These neurotransmitters work together to balance brain activity. Specifically, glutamate excites neurons, stimulating them to fire, while GABA dampens down the firing of brain cells. A TBI can upset this balance and keep the brain from functioning normally.

Frequently, a TBI damages the structure deep in the brain involved in higher learning and memory known as the hippocampus. In their new study, the scientists discovered that an injury to the hippocampus reduces levels of BCAAs. That throws the critical balance of neurotransmitters in the hippocampus into disarray, causing some localized regions of the brain to be more excitable and others less excitable.

To test the idea that dietary BCAAs would restore the normal balance of neural responses to brain-injured animals, the scientists worked with mice that had been conditioned to fear a mild electric shock in their cage. The animals had developed a “freezing” response when placed in the cage because they anticipated a shock. Then the research team created brain injuries in one group of mice with this conditioned fear response and, a week later, compared this group to animals conditioned to the fear response that had no TBI. The injured mice had partially lost their memory of past shocks and so had fewer “freezing” responses.

However, when the brain-injured mice were given water to drink that contained BCAAs, the amino acid cocktail restored their learning ability and they regained the same normal responses as the uninjured animals. Moreover, additional experiments showed that BCAAs had restored the animals’ normal balance of neural activity.

Previous studies have revealed that people with brain injuries show mild functional improvements after receiving BCAAs through an intravenous line (IV). Dr. Cohen stated the new study suggests that BCAAs used as a dietary supplement could offer more sustained benefits than amino acids given through IVs. Early-phase clinical trials of dietary BCAAs in patients with mild to moderate traumatic brain injuries are expected to begin over the next year.

Source: http://www.naturalnews.com/027849_amino_acids_brain_damage.html

Traditional Chinese acupuncture curbs the severity of hot flushes and other menopausal symptoms, suggests a small study published today in Acupuncture in Medicine.

The effects did not seem to be related to changes in levels of the hormones responsible for sparking the menopause and its associated symptoms, the study shows.

The authors base their findings on 53 middle aged women, all of whom were classified as being postmenopausal – they had spontaneously stopped having periods for a year. Their somatic (hot flushes) urogenital (vaginal dryness and urinary tract infection) and psychological (mood swings) symptoms were measured using a five point scale (MRS).

Twenty seven of the women received traditional Chinese acupuncture twice a week for 10 weeks, with needles left in position for 20 minutes without any manual or electrical stimulation. The rest were given sham acupuncture.

Hormone levels of oestrogen, follicular stimulating hormone (FSH), and luteinising hormone (LH) were measured before the study began and after the first and last acupuncture sessions in both groups to see if these changed.

The results showed that those women given traditional acupuncture had significantly lower MRS scores for somatic and psychological, but not urogenital, symptoms at the end of the 10 weeks than their peers given the sham treatment. The symptom registering the sharpest fall in severity was that of hot flushes.

Furthermore, the effects seemed to be cumulative, with stronger results seen between the first and last sessions.

Oestrogen levels also rose, while LH levels fell in the group treated with traditional Chinese acupuncture. Low levels of oestrogen and high LH and FSH levels are characteristic of the menopause, as the ovaries start to fail.

But because of the differences between the groups in these various hormones to start with, there was little evidence to suggest that any hormonal fluctuations were themselves responsible for the changes in symptom severity, say the authors.

They suggest that the explanation for the reduced severity of hot flushes might be that acupuncture boosts the production of endorphins, which may stabilise the body’s temperature controls.

The authors caution that their study was small and that they did not monitor how long symptom relief lasted, but they suggest that traditional Chinese acupuncture could be an alternative for those women unable or unwilling to use hormone replacement therapy to ease troublesome menopausal symptoms.

Link to article.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/218375.php

Source
Acupuncture in Medicine (British Medical Journal)

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