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| |  WCN: Tongue Acupuncture Shows Promise For Autism By Richard Robinson Special to DG News
LONDON, ENGLAND -- June 21, 2001 -- Acupuncture to the tongue can improve symptoms of Autistic spectrum disorder, according to a study presented today at the 17th World Congress of Neurology here. This surprising result is news not only for the treatment of autism, but for the practice of acupuncture, because the tongue has never been part of the canonical set of targets for needle insertion. According to Dr. Virginia Wong of the Division of Child Neurology at the University of Hong Kong, tongue acupuncture has been developed in the last two decades by her colleague and collaborator in this study, Dr. J.G. Sun. Based on the traditional Chinese view that the tongue and heart are connected through meridians that spread to all the organs of the body, Dr. Sun believes he has identified effective acupuncture points on the tongue that influence the state of the body’s organs, and it is through this that symptomatic relief of autism occurs. To test the effectiveness of tongue acupuncture in autism, Dr. Wong randomized 30 children, ages three to 15, to receive either their standard educational and therapeutic program, or the standard program plus tongue acupuncture treatments. All children were judged by therapists and teachers to have reached a plateau on standard therapies before the trial began. Treatment consisted of several seconds of tongue acupuncture once a day, five days per week for eight weeks. Dr. Wong reported that the mean change in the Functional Independence Measure was approximately 12 points for treated children, versus one point for untreated children (p=0.005), with highly significant improvements in the sub-domains of self-care and cognition. Other significant differences were seen in the Caregiver Global Impression Scale, Parental Stress Index, Ritvo-Freeman Real Life Index, and communication scales. Dr. Wong did not claim to know how the tongue acupuncture is working, but noted that the goal of acupuncture is to promote health, rather than to address specific disease states. She and her colleagues have recently finished a double-blind test of this technique they hope to present later this year, whose results are "very good, very similar to this open trial," she said. In addition, they are conducting positron-emission tomography (PET) scan studies to determine how the brain is changing as a result of tongue acupuncture.
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