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Updated: Apr 7, 2026
Monitoring Acupuncture Effects on Human Brain by fMRI
Published on: April 8, 2010
Effect of Acupuncture on Functional Connectivity of Anterior Cingulate Cortex for Bell's Palsy Patients with
Hongli Wu1, Hongxing Kan2, Chuanfu Li3
1Medical Information Engineering, Anhui University of Chinese Medicine, Hefei, Anhui 230012, China ; Laboratory of Digital Medical Imaging, Medical Imaging Center, The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui University of Chinese Medicine, Hefei, Anhui 230031, China.
Abstract:
Acupuncture is widely used in the treatment of Bell's palsy (BP) in many countries, but its underlying physiological mechanism remained controversial. In order to explore the potential mechanism, changes of functional connectivity (FC) of anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC) were investigated. We collected 20 healthy (control group) participants and 28 BP patients with different clinical duration accepted resting state functional MRI (rfMRI) scans before and after acupuncture, respectively. The FC of ACC before and after acupuncture was compared with paired t-test and the detailed results are presented in the paper. Our results showed that effects of the acupuncture on FC were closely related to clinical duration in patients with BP, which suggested that brain response to acupuncture was closely connected with the status of brain functional connectivity and implied that acupuncture plays a homeostatic role in the BP treatment.
