Acupuncture, as a traditional Chinese medical treatment, has been wildely used in China because of less side effect, economical and practical, broad indications, and efficient. And acupuncture is increasingly recognized by the international medical community. However, the traditional Chinese medicine is hard to compatible with modern biomedical theory. So the the modern biomedical mechanism of acupuncture can't be clearly interpreted up to now. The development of modern biomedicine imaging technology, especially magnetic resource imaging (MRI), provides a new way and an effective assessment to discover the iconography mechanism of acupuncture. With MRI, the potential neuromechanism of acupuncture may be discovered, which may not only enrich the Chinese medical theory, but also the popularization and application of Chinese acupuncture in the world. Neuroimaging studies of acupuncture in the last ten years mainly focused on the sustained effects of acupuncture and acupuncture specificity. These studies have made a series of research results. However, most of the studies explored acupuncture mechanisms based on healthy subjects. The results are hard to be used in clinical application. Therefore, further studies on the mechanisms of acupuncture based on patients would be important for the clinical applicantion of acupuncture. In the present study, we focused on the neuromechanisms of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its early symptoms, mild cogmitive impairment (MCI), and the modulatory effects of acupuncture on MCI. We carried out the following researches: First, we explored the topological attributes of the brain networks of AD and MCI patients. By comparing the brain network connection mode in AD patients, MCI patients, and healthy controls, we found that AD and MCI patient showed significant loss of small-world attributes. And AD patients showed more serious damage of the brain network topology. The results suggested that the damage of the brain network topology may be related with the Severity of AD. Second, we investigated the effective connectivity among the resting state brain networks of AD patients combining ICA and mGCA. We found that, the effective connectivity among the resting state networks in AD patients decreased in both strength and quantity compared with that in healthy controls. In addition, we found that the auditory network and default mode network in AD patients played a less important role while the function of the memory network and ex...
修改评论