Brain Functional Interaction of Acupuncture Effects in Diarrhea-Dominant Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Acupuncture is a traditional Chinese medicine treatment that has widely been used to modulate gastrointestinal dysfunction caused by irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and to alleviate the resulting pain. Recent studies have shown that gastrointestinal dysfunction caused by IBS is associated with dysregulation of the brain's central and peripheral nervous system, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) helps explore functional abnormality of the brain. However, previous studies rarely used fMRI to study the correlations between brain functional connection, interaction, or segregation (e.g., network degree and clustering coefficient) and acupuncture stimulation in IBS. To bridge this knowledge gap, we study the changed brain functional connection, interaction, and segregation before and after acupuncture stimulation for diarrhea-dominant IBS (IBS-D) with the help of complex network methods based on fMRI. Our results indicate that the abnormal functional connections (FCs) in the right hippocampus, right superior occipital gyrus, left lingual gyrus, left middle occipital gyrus, and the cerebellum, and abnormal network degree in right middle occipital gyrus, where normal controls are significantly different from IBS-D patients, are improved after acupuncture stimulation. These changed FCs and the network degree before and after acupuncture stimulation have significant correlations with the changed clinical information including IBS symptom severity score (r = -0.54, p = 0.0065) and IBS quality of life (r = 0.426, p = 0.038). We conclude that the changes of the brain functional connection, interaction, and segregation in the hippocampus, middle and superior occipital gyrus, cerebellum, and the lingual gyrus may be related to acupuncture stimulation. The abnormal functional connection, interaction, and segregation in IBS-D may be improved after acupuncture stimulation.