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Research Briefs Needful treatments. A new study by researchers from BU's School of Management and School of Medicine has shown that treating drug detoxification patients with acupuncture on an outpatient basis dramatically decreases their relapse rate, and could be an important alternative to inpatient care. SMG Professor of Operations Management Michael Shwartz, MED Assistant Professor Richard Saitz, SPH Professor Patrick Brannigan, and Kevin Mulvey, a member of the Boston Public Health Commission, compared the readmission rates of detox patients treated in an outpatient acupuncture program to those treated in a short-term residential program. They used data from 8,011 patients addicted to drugs -- including crack, heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and marijuana -- who had been discharged from publicly funded detoxification programs in Boston. "Fourteen percent of patients who used acupuncture and outpatient treatment had lower six-month readmission rates than patients of residential detox programs," says Shwartz. "We also found that treatments including acupuncture appear particularly effective for alcohol-abusing clients with two or more detox admissions in the previous year." The researchers discovered, however, that the most important factor in relapses is the patient's previous detox history. "Those who had not been admitted for detox a year before our study were the most likely not to relapse within six months," he says. Though an individual acupuncture session is much less expensive than a day in residential detox, the longer duration of treatment reduces its potential economic benefit. Still, researchers concluded, it does have a benefit: it can easily expand its capacity without adding inpatient services, the researchers concluded. "Although more studies are clearly needed, our findings suggest the value of outpatient acupuncture as a component of a substance abuse treatment system," says Shwartz. "It is something to keep in mind when residential detox beds are in short supply." The study was published in the December 1999 Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment.

Brains waived. Scientists at the CAS Center for Polymer Studies have found that microcolumns -- vertical structures found in the cerebral cortex of normal brains -- are disrupted in the brains of people affected by Alzheimer's disease. According to H. Eugene Stanley, professor of physics and senior coauthor, the discovery may be the key to understanding and reversing the disease. The research team developed a novel imaging technology based on statistical physics to visualize and analyze brain tissue. They compared the brains of control subjects to patients who were stricken with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and a related condition known as Lewy body dementia (LBD). The images revealed microcolumns -- chains of about 11 neurons -- linked together like the segments of a snake running perpendicularly through the levels of the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex controls functions such as rational thought and speech in normal subjects. However, lead author and CAS Physics Research Associate Sergey Buldyrev says, "In LBD we saw practically no such microcolumns, and in AD the columns were much smaller and less pronounced than in the controls. This disruption may correlate with cognitive impairment." In patients with Alzheimer's, roughly half of all the brain's neurons are lost. In Lewy body dementia, only about 10 percent of these neurons disappear. But it appeared that these patients' brains also had a dramatic absence of microcolumns. This led the research team to surmise that the loss of vertical organization is connected to cognitive loss. The imaging technique used in the study relies on methods developed in the field of statistical physics for the study of liquids and crystals. The researchers say the technique may also someday be applied to study tissue changes in other neurological diseases, such as schizophrenia. The study appeared as the cover story of the May 9 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

"Research Briefs" is written by Janice Zazinski in the Office of Public Relations. To read more about BU research, visit http://www.bu.edu/research.

1 June 2000
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