Anales RANF

S17-04 PURINERGIC SIGNALLING AND ACUPUNCTURE-INDUCED ANALGESIA Hai-Yan Yin, Ya-Fei Zhao, Can Bai, Wen-Jing Ren, Ying Zhang, Yong Tang Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese medicine, Chengdu,China Acupuncture has been used in China from ancient times since more than 2,000 years ago. A variety of disorders can be treated effectively by inserting long, fine needles into specific acupuncture points (acupoints) on the skin of the patient’s body. Since acupuncture was proposed by National Institutes of Health (NIH) consensus in 1997 as a therapeutic intervention of complementary medicine, acupuncture efficacy has become more and more accepted in the Western world. Among acupuncture therapies, the acupuncture-induced analgesic effect has been used widely to alleviate diverse types of pain, particularly chronic pain. To date, acupuncture analgesia has drawn the attention of many investigators and become an important research subject of international interest around the world. Numerous studies have also demonstrated that acupuncture analgesia has physiological, anatomical and neurochemical basis despite that there is still an ongoing debate about the mechanism by which acupuncture alleviates pain. Since Professor Geoffrey Burnstock proposed that purinergic signalling, rather than a mystical subepidermal energy, may explain how acupuncture works in an article in Medical Hypotheses in 2009, the role of purinergic signalling in acupuncture research has gained much attention. So far, more scientists have got started to study the role of purinergic signalling in acupuncture-induced analgesia. In this talk, the work have been done by our group and other scientists will be summarized and where we are going and how we are going to get there in this amazing field will be described.