Why the study?
Acupuncture increases Achilles tendon blood circulation, but changes in blood circulation between patellar and Achilles tendons during and after acupuncture, and their relation to the autonomic nervous system, remained to be compared.
Does acupuncture induce different changes in blood circulation between patellar and Achilles tendons?
Does acupuncture induce different changes in blood circulation between patellar and Achilles tendons?
Acupuncture-induced changes in blood circulation of the patellar tendon are markedly lower than those of the Achilles tendon, independent of autonomic nervous system changes.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Patellar tendon blood volume response to acupuncture is blunted versus Achilles; hypothesis-generating for tendon-specific interventions, requires clinical validation.
We found acupuncture and heating increased blood circulation of Achilles tendon, which implies these treatments are useful to heal-injured tendons. In addition, the heating-induced change in blood circulation of patellar tendon was greater than that of Achilles tendon. The purpose of this study was to compare changes in blood circulation of patellar and Achilles tendons during and after acupuncture. Furthermore, we verified whether acupuncture-induced changes in tendon blood circulation were related to those in autonomic nervous system. During acupuncture treatment and recovery period (40 minutes), blood volume (THb) of patellar and Achilles tendons was measured using red laser lights. In addition, heart rate and ratio of low-frequency to high-frequency components of heart rate variability (LF/HF ratio) were measured. THb of patellar tendon was significantly lower than that of Achilles tendon immediately after insertion of needle, latter half of acupuncture treatment, and recovery period. For both tendons, heart rate and LF/HF ratio did not change during experimental period. The results suggest that acupuncture-induced changes in blood circulation of patellar tendon are markedly lower than that of Achilles tendon, although site difference in changes in tendon blood circulation is not related to those in autonomic nervous system assessed by heart rate variability.
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Kubo et al. (2020) studied this question.
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