Targeting Mechanisms of Typical Indications of Acupuncture

As described in the 2011 White Paper of Society of Acupuncture Research, “one of the bottlenecks in current studies on the acupuncture mechanism is the gap between basic research and clinical research.” This gap is particularly obvious in neuroimaging studies of the central mechanism of acupuncture. Between 1998 and 2011, only nine studies were published that focused on mechanisms of disease with respect to acupuncture, which is less than 10% of the number of studies conducted using healthy subjects. In addition, controversial or contradictory findings are often reported in studies that use different models of diseases. Given the utility of disease biomarkers in the brain in previous studies, and that acupuncture is known to have regulatory effects on the brain for the treatment of some diseases, it can be proposed that the target of acupuncture and central biomarkers of diseases may converge in the same spatial location.