Response of the Autonomic Nervous System to Auricular Stimulation of the Vagus Nerve (x)

Plain-language summary

While invasive vagal stimulation has proven its therapeutic effectiveness over the past 20 years, particularly in the treatment of epilepsy or depression, its implementation is hampered by the high cost, high technicality and sometimes significant side effects. Non-invasive vagal stimulation, most often electric, is a less expensive therapeutic alternative and easier to implement, although the level of evidence is lower than that of invasive stimulation. Some so-called traditional therapies, such as acupuncture, also stimulate certain parts of the ear by mechanical means, most often by puncturing the ear or the concha. In these traditional therapies, more than one hundred stimulation points have been described, each precisely positioned according to an empirical topography. However, electrical non-invasive stimulation recognizes only three areas of interest on the ear, which are the areas of sensitive innervation, namely the afferences of the vagus nerve in the concha, which is the only one used in practice, the large occipital nerve on the lobe and part of the helix, and the auriculotemporal nerve on the rest of the auricular flag. In this study, we would like to explore the justification for the topographic precision, adopted by traditional therapies, for non-invasive vagal stimulation on the concha.

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