Study on the Regulating Effect of Acupoint Electroacupuncture on the Depression Level of Drug Addicts

Abstract

In order to study the regulating effect of electroacupuncture at specific acupoints on the depression level of drug addicts, we randomly selected 42 drug addicts from Sichuan drug rehabilitation center of women and divided them into treatment group (13), comfort group (10) and control group (19) from April to August 2019. Venous blood was taken before and after treatment, and the serum samples such as Noradrenalin (NA) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) were systematically detected. At the same time, Beck Depression Scale was used to detect the level of depression before and after treatment. Results showed that the level of depression in the real acupuncture group decreased significantly after treatment (p < 0.05). The contents of NA and BDNF in the serum of the real acupuncture group increased after treatment, but did not reach a significant level. In a word, the combination therapy of electroacupuncture can improve the levels of BDNF and NA in drug addicts and adjust their depression level, which is worthy of clinical promotion.

Keywords

Electroacupuncture / Drug addiction / Depression / Traditional Chinese medicine

Acknowledgments

We thank all the staff from the drug rehabilitation center for their cooperation and support. We also thank all participants for their cooperation and efforts.

Funding

This study was supported by the Xinglin Scholar Project (QJJJ2 021006).

Conflict of interest

There is no conflict of interest in this study.

Author contributions

RFW: designed research, collected data, and conceptualized the study. JZH: conceptualized the study, performed literature review, wrote the article, and revised the article. BT and LL: organized in-vestigation and data curation. JL, CWZ, ZLL, and BBW: provided resources and opinions. All authors contributed to this manuscript and approved the submitted version.

Data availability statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics statement

All experimental processes involving human participants were re-viewed and approved by the review committee of Sichuan Drug Re-habilitation Administration. This study was approved by the ethics committee of Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Ethical approval document No: 2019KL-053) and passed the regis-tration application of China clinical trial registration center (Clinical trial registration No: ChiCTR1900027543). The experimental pro-cedure was in accordance with the ethical principles of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. All participants provided informed consent before participation.

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