Study of Unique Morphological Features of Primo Vascular System

Abstract

there has been a lot of controversy issue over its reliability. Thus, in this thesis, the three hypotheses on PVS theory were mainly focused to prove for its distinguishing features and at the same time, suggest a new analysis method to make us to understand the complexity of this system from a new perspective. First, in order to PVS accepted as a liquid flowing system, there have always been two major issues coming up. The first one was directly to show the flow of liquid in PVS and the second was to explain why it was not observed in the conventional histological analysis of animal tissues. In order to find the answers to those, we injected fluorescent nanoparticles (FNPs) into a primo node and traced them along primo vessels which was located in the inside a fat tissue which is parallel to the linea alba in the parietal side of the abdominal wall. In previous experiment, the simple flow of injected staining dye (alcian blue) was observed. However, in this experiment, we could possibly trace the flow of FNPs to other subsystems of the PVS. Not just that in this work, we could give a small clue as to why PVS was difficult to observe in conventional histology. In our previous work, we proposed the importance for finding an effective method to find the PVS in skin and need for study on the ultrastructure of the primo vessel (PV). So, in following chapters, we investigated the detailed morphological features of PV inside a lymph vessel with a transmission electron microscope (TEM) and compared the results with the previous study of the PV found on the surfaces of internal organs. These data confirm that the subsystem of PV is found in different parts of body revealed the similarity to one another. Lastly, we focused on explaining the newly developed analysis methods of the acupuncture points (APs) located in the skin of the mouse. In several studies, many of them were still described between MCs and APs

however, they did not provide the answer for the reason. By studying the mast cells (MCs) distribution and densities of the whole mouse ventral skin, we used this information to infer the locations, sizes and depths of the skin layers of APs. This type of estimation was done first time. The methods used in this study can be useful to investigate further gross anatomical features of APs. Also, due to the significant roles of MCs in our body, it is clearly implied that acupuncture plays an important role in MCs in the treatment of diseases. By having the more precise knowledge of skin AP locations and sizes to submillimeter precision, along with their cytological characterizations, would provide significant contributions to both scientific investigations and further acupuncture treatment.

Acupuncture has been a major medical practice for thousands of years in China, Korea, and Japan, yet the mechanism underlying acupuncture has still not been unambiguously identified on a scientific basis. From the many previous studies, the known anatomical structure corresponding to the classical acupuncture points and meridians has been presented as the Primo Vascular System (PVS), which was first discovered by Bong Han Kim in early1960. It is being introduced in public as a newly-discovered third circulatory system on par with the circulatory and lymphatic system. Despite its potential importance in health-related fields, it has been ignored for a long time. Only recently, researchers have been carrying out a lot of well-designed research studies to investigate its physical and physiological peculiarity of acupuncture system based on the anatomical and scientific bases, but still it has not been identified fully enough. And even results achieved from experiments performed under the Kims theory