Senior pets appear more cognitively aware after acupuncture. An expert explains why

In this video, acupuncturist Bonnie D. Wright, DVM, DACVAA, CVMA, CVPP, CCRT, CCRP, discusses how acupuncture may offer more than just pain relief for aging patients. In addition to addressing age-related changes in immune function, a process known as immunosenescence, she describes observed effects related to cognitive health.

According to Wright, when undergoing acupuncture therapy to treat chronic disease in senior patients, there has been an observed return to youthful behaviors and a decrease in signs of cognitive decline. She points to findings from human studies in older adults with cognitive decline, in which researchers noted changes in brain wave patterns following acupuncture. Although veterinary-specific data remain limited, Wright says emerging research in people may help explain similar patterns observed clinically in aging animal patients.

Related: The physiology behind acupuncture for bladder and pelvic pain

Below is the transcript, lightly edited for clarity.

Wright: What we see with senior patients is this balance of treating chronic conditions, like chronic pain. One of the issues that occurs with aging is changes in the immune balance. We call it immunosenescence, where their immune system doesn't balance as well. So, everything we just talked about for pelvic disease relates to senior conditions.

But then there's this sort of added bonus that we see in senior patients after a treatment, that they are much more cognitively aware, and we seem to get more of their native behaviors back. People say, ‘Oh, they're acting like they did when they were young.’ And the research would show that acupuncture does help to normalize some of those brain waves, some of that central programming, and the relationship between those.

And in studies in people even, one of the unexpected outcomes when they do fairly simple acupuncture studies has been to show that the caregivers of some of the people that are seniors and maybe have some sundowners and cognitive decline, is the caregivers were able to detect which were the active group, even when it was something like a knee being treated because they saw a huge diminishment in those cognitive issues like sundowners in the active treated group, and it wasn't what they were looking for.

So, we see that subjectively in our veterinary species, and it's been caught in some of the human data, and now they're doing some of the measurement of those brain patterns and realizing that acupuncture does intervene with those and help to normalize those. There's a lot we don't know on the veterinary side, but certainly some pretty exciting data that explains what we see clinically, which is a significant improvement in those geriatric cognitive decline patients.