Skeletal muscle after fine needle stimulation

Fine needle stimulation also known as acupuncture is a traditional Chinese medical practice which causes relief of pain. We demonstrated that it caused neovascularization and enhanced recovery of blood perfusion in a ischemic portion of skeletal muscle in rats with hindlimb ischemia. Therefore we evaluated the effect of fine needle stimulation on skeletal muscle at gene expression level Keywords: Evaluation of physical stimulation With 0.14mm diameter stainless steel needle, a hundred pricks were applied in a 100 square mili-meter region on addductor portion of the left rat hindlimb. Right hindlimb was left intact as control. 24 hrs after fine needle stimulation, skeletal muscle sample was resected from adductor muscle of fine needle stimulated left hindlimb and non-stimulated right hindlimbs, respectively. Then gene expression analysis with microarray was conducted on each skelatal muscle sample.