Traditional Chinese Medicine Treatment, Gua Sha, can Induce Subtle Molecular Changes in Gene Expression

Here, we explored molecular changes that could potentially mediate healing effects of Gua Sha — a method employed by the Chinese traditional medicine with proven track records of safe and efficient applications dating back to ancient times as well as support from randomized controlled trials performed by modern medical studies — yet remaining almost entirely unexplored by the modern-day high-throughput methods of the -omics sciences. We investigated transcriptome changes occurring shortly after Gua Sha treatment in the whole blood of healthy volunteers using bulk RNA-seq analysis. We applied various analytical tools to identify genes with consistent expression changes in multiple individuals in response to Gua Sha and their networks. We found that while the changes were very subtle and individual-specific, we could identify consistent upregulation of three histone genes. Further analysis of the potential regulatory networks of these histone genes revealed the enrichment of functions involved in the immune response and inflammation. The significance of these results in the context of potential effects of Gua Sha and the next steps in exploring the molecular mechanisms of action of this technique are discussed.