A Narrative Review of Clinical researches of Acupuncture treatment for Depression using Neuroimaging method: Focusing on SCI papers

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this article was to investigate the current status of clinical studies of acupuncture treatment for depression using neuroimaging method, focusing on SCI papers.Methods: We searched for clinical trial studies of acupuncture treatment for depression using neuroimaging method in the MEDLINE (Pubmed), OASIS, and RISS database. Once the online search was finished, studies were selected manually by the inclusion criteria. Finally, we analyzed the characteristics of selected articles and reviewed the neural substrates of acupuncture treatment in depression.Results: Total eight studies were included in this study. The most frequently utilized modality was functional MRI. The most frequently selected acupoint for depression was GV20. Several studies revealed that acupuncture treatment could improve the symptoms of depression. In this manuscript, we demonstrated that neuroimaging techniques could capture the neural substrates associated with depression and acupuncture treatment may modulate the activation of brain areas which were impaired in depression in a different way from sham acupuncture.Conclusions: Utilizing neuroimaging methods to explore neural mechanism of acupuncture treatment on depression would be helpful in clinical trials and more efforts should be needed in this fields.