[Current Status of Researches on Brain-imaging Responses of Acupuncture Stimulation Based on Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging]

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the underlying mechanisms of acupuncture therapy attracts an increasing attention nowadays. In the present article, the authors make a brief analysis on the progresses of researches about the intra-brain responses of acupuncture stimulation following collecting original research papers with key words of "acupuncture","fMRI" and "magnetic resonance imaging" in PubMed and CNKI databases from January 2003 to December 2014. As a result, a total of 253 original research articles were collected. We found that:1) in the past 10 years, the amount of fMRI studies on acupuncture is growing; 2) most of these studies (183) are conducted in healthy subjects, and fewer studies (44) conducted in patients with problems of neurology, psychonosology, gastroenterology, circulation system, pediatrics, myopia and dermatology, or with pain; 3)a larger population of studies are designed to reveal the specificity of responses of acupuncture point stimulation, and fewer focus on analyzing the regularities of acupuncture points combination. The authors suggest that the coming acupuncture-neuroimaging studies need to expand the research ranges or contents, and improve experimental designs, data analysis and quality control (for example, reducing differences of baseline data, age span, psychological state, etc., and increasing sample size, etc).