BACKGROUND: Peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs) can be enhanced and differentiates into all kinds of neural cells and produce several kinds of neural growth factors in vitro, and have been used to treat several kinds of neural diseases and they showed satisfactory outcomes. It is now a research focus to optimize the culture conditions to induce the stem cell to differentiate into neural cells. On the other hand, it also becomes a focus of its amplification and differentiation. OBJECTIVE: To make a review on researches on treating brain lesion, genetic defection or degenerating diseases using PBSCs during recent years.METHODS: Researching Pubmed database(1999-01/2009-09), using "peripheral blood stem cell, neural, repair" as research words and these Chinese words in CNKI database(1999-01/2009-09). RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: 221 articles were collected altogether including 41 Chinese articles and 180 English articles. Totally 27 articles were adapted altogether after rejecting published early, repeat and similar articles. PBSCs can be enhanced and differentiates into all kinds of neural cells in vitro, and delivered into central neural system and improve the function of lesion neural area. It is not fully understood the differentiation mechanism of peripheral blood stem cells, but numerous studies have shown that surface marker antigen of peripheral blood stem cells is closely associated with its biological characteristics. There are many studies addressing surface marker of peripheral blood stem cells, but researchers cannot identify a reliable marker that can directly label peripheral blood stem cells. Function of CD34 remains unclear, so the principle of CD34 as a marker of hematopoietic stem cells receives challenge. It is necessary to do further researches on issues on how to enhance survival rate of PBSCs in vivo and the tendency to differentiate into neural cells.