Post-stroke Depression Combined with Constipation: Research Progress on Pathogenesis of Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine and Acupuncture Therapy

Abstract

Depression and constipation are two common complications during the recovery period after stroke. These two disorders frequently coexist and interact to form a vicious cycle, impairing patients’ physical and mental health as well as quality of life and hindering rehabilitation. At present, western medicine mainly adopts symptomatic medications for depression and constipation separately. Such treatment only achieves limited and short-term symptom relief; long-term medication is prone to diverse adverse reactions and fails to simultaneously improve emotional and intestinal lesions, resulting in unsatisfactory overall efficacy. Benefiting from holistic syndrome differentiation and multi-target regulation, acupuncture of traditional Chinese medicine matches the pathological feature of simultaneous brain-gut impairment and synchronous brain-gut treatment. This paper systematically reviews the pathogenesis of post-stroke depression combined with constipation from both western and Chinese medical perspectives, summarizes the clinical application of various acupuncture regimens, and elaborates the unique advantages of acupuncture in brain-gut synchronous therapy, so as to provide theoretical evidence for standardized clinical management and further relevant researches of this comorbidity.