OBJECTIVEThrough analysis of oversea published literatures on central effect mechanism of acupuncture in recent years, the general tendency in this filed is discussed so as to provide references for later studies.

METHODSPubmed database from January 2009 to May 2012 is retrieved with the key words of acupuncture and fMRI. As a result, 38 articles are included.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSHealthy subjects are adopted for most of researches. And studies are carried out through three aspects of response characteristics of acupuncture analgesia, response characteristics of acupuncture specificity and duration of acupuncture effect. However, the brain activities of healthy subjects are obviously different from that of patients. Moreover, acupuncture treatment is also different from modern therapies. Therefore, it is held that patients should be adopted as study subjects in the future studies, and various bias in research designation and implementation course should be avoided.