Effects of Acupuncture Treatment in Reducing Sleep Disorder and Gut Microbiota Alterations in PCPA-Induced Insomnia Mice

Chronic insomnia without intervention will do harm to people's physical and psychological health as well as the quality of life. While ensuring efficacy, traditional Chinese medicine therapy, such as acupuncture, overcomes the side effects of drugs. However, the molecular mechanism of traditional medicine is unclear and it encounters many obstacles in repetitiveness and popularization. On the other side, the placebo effects also need to be eliminated during the intervention. In this study, a number of indicators such as duration of sleep latency, serum markers, pineal gland immunohistochemistry, and gut microbes were detected in the PCPA-induced insomnia mice to compare the effects between acupuncture and hypnotic drug treatments. Although the food intake and weight were not changed, the results show that serum maker and gut microbiota alterations were mediated by concurrent changes in sleep disorder induced by PCPA in mice. Compared with the PCPA-induced insomnia group, dopamine, 5-hydroxytryptamine, and norepinephrine were reduced in serum, and the melatonin was increased in the pineal gland of the acupuncture group as well as zopiclone drug group. Moreover, the analysis results from 16S tag sequencing of the gut microbiome bacterial rRNA hypervariable region show the same improvement effects between the two medical intervention groups. A co-occurrence network analysis showed that blank and acupuncture networks exhibited higher similarity than sham and zopiclone networks and the sham network possessed the highest complexity of microbial communities. Taken together, the gut microbiome will likely be a new target for improving sleep disorders, and taking into account the side effects of hypnotic drugs, nonpharmacological interventions such as acupuncture may be an effective means and have greater clinical benefits.