Acupuncture is a component of traditional Chinese medicine, and has evolved empirically over three thousand years to treat a multitude of ailments. In the past three decades, its popularity has been spreaded in the Western world. Lacking explaination to its underlying mechanism, acupuncture is still considered to be the action of placebo as a complemantary therapy. FMRI, as a noninvading imaging technique, may provide new tools for acupuncture study on human beings. Based on BOLD-fMRI, this paper focuses on exploration to the intrinsical characteristic of acupuncture based on the traditional Chinese medicine. The primary achievement was made in the study of acupuncture on Zusanli and its related brain responses. Our primary works are listed as follows. (1) Study of the lasting effects of acupuncture from a functional connectivity analysis. We proposed a pain and unpleasant emotion related networks around amygdala constructed in the resting brain. Alougth acupuncture and sham stimulation can both exert influence to the regulation of this network, the mechanism of their actions may be achieved by different brain circuits. (2) Starting with an overview of the previous acupuncture studies, we focus on its lasting effect and unravel several overlayed actions in the manipulation of acupuncture: the mechanical stimulation by needle insertion, subject anticipation, and acupunctureeffect. This is the initial study to focus the baseline state in acupuncture researches, which always neglected in the previous studies. (3) As for some problems in the previous block-designed studies, we proposed anew “Reblocking” method, which can effectively unraveled the confusion of several effects to provide a clear identification of actual acupuncture effect. The proposal of “Reblocking”concept further arouse the attention of important baseline state in the acupuncture studies.
修改评论