In clinical studies large effects produced by sham acupuncture were observed –. Although the clinical effect of acupuncture is generally accepted for certain diagnoses, such as knee pain, low back pain etc., there exists controversy regarding the specific effect of acupuncture, especially for the specificity of acupuncture points and meridians. From a neurophysiological aspect acupuncture can be regarded as a complex somatosensory stimulation. Currently, acupuncture is used widely all over the world, but its biological mechanism is not well understood. Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese treatment that has been systematically used for over 2000 years. Differences between verum and sham acupuncture were noted in brain response in middle cingulate, while some heterogeneity was noted for other regions depending on how such meta-analyses were performed, such as sensorimotor cortices, limbic regions, and cerebellum.Īcupuncture is a therapy of inserting and manipulating fine filiform needles into specific body locations (acupuncture points) to treat diseases. Meta-analyses for verum acupuncture stimuli confirmed brain activity within many of the regions mentioned above. From a descriptive perspective, multiple studies reported that acupuncture modulates activity within specific brain areas, including somatosensory cortices, limbic system, basal ganglia, brain stem, and cerebellum. 779 papers were identified, 149 met the inclusion criteria for the descriptive analysis, and 34 were eligible for the meta-analyses. We included all studies using fMRI to investigate the effect of acupuncture on the human brain (at least one group that received needle-based acupuncture). We systematically searched English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese databases for literature published from the earliest available up until September 2009, without any language restrictions.

Napadow et al. human brain mapping 2007