Acupuncture May Rewire the Brain to Ease Depression

Acupuncture, an established and important element of Chinese medicine, has been practised for thousands of years. It is still used to help relieve the pain and discomfort associated with numerous conditions, including fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis.

The treatment has also shown potential for reducing symptoms of depression. Until now, though, the reason for this has remained uncertain.

Acupuncture and depression in brain scans

A new study in Medicine, led by researchers at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, examined brain-imaging data from seven earlier clinical trials. Together, these trials included 357 people with major depressive disorder.

The team compared brain scans from people treated with acupuncture with those of participants taking antidepressants or receiving a placebo form of acupuncture. Their analysis suggested that acupuncture may rewire particular regions of the brain.

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"Acupuncture shows promise as an adjunctive therapy for depression, but its neurobiological mechanisms remain incompletely understood," write the researchers in their published paper.

"Our findings indicate that acupuncture-based interventions elicit a distinct pattern of neuroplastic remodeling, targeting key regions involved in emotion regulation and reward processing, which contrasts with the hippocampal–occipital effects of conventional treatments."

Brain regions affected by acupuncture

Among patients who received acupuncture treatment, activity rose in the right cingulum, a region associated with emotional control, and in the right caudate nucleus, which forms part of the brain's reward system.

A separate analysis associated a higher number of acupuncture sessions with more substantial changes in the brain's left amygdala. As this area plays an important role in emotional processing, the findings suggest the needle-based treatment could act as a type of emotional brake.

The researchers found that acupuncture affected different parts of the brain to antidepressants. (Zhang et al., *Medicine, 2026)*

For participants taking antidepressants, the pattern differed. Increased brain activity occurred in the left hippocampus, which is involved in memory and stress regulation, and in the right middle occipital gyrus, an area responsible for visual processing.

Against antidepressants alone, acupuncture was more successful at lowering depression and anxiety scores among the study volunteers. However, it is important to note that most participants in the acupuncture groups were also taking antidepressant medication.

"The correlation between neuroplastic changes in affective circuits and clinical improvement supports a potential mechanism for acupuncture's efficacy in alleviating core depressive symptoms such as anhedonia and emotional dysregulation," write the researchers.

A potential alternative treatment route

Understanding of the underlying mechanisms is still at an early stage. Even so, the results indicate that acupuncture can reduce symptoms of depression and does so through neural pathways different from those used by conventional medicines.

This could be especially relevant for the substantial proportion of people with depression who do not respond to standard treatments. Acupuncture may provide another route.

"This pattern suggests that acupuncture may offer complementary mechanisms for patients who exhibit hippocampal nonresponsiveness or reward-circuit dysfunction – a common phenotype in treatment-resistant depression," write the researchers.

According to the World Health Organization, nearly 6 in every 100 adults globally experience depression. The condition appears to arise from a complex mix of influences, including genetics, environmental pressures and physical health.

Although progress is being made in identifying ways to tackle it, relief remains out of reach for some people with depression. The condition is also thought to increase the likelihood of other health issues, including dementia.

The next stage will be to assess acupuncture's effects over longer periods and in larger, more diverse groups than this analysis could include. Acupuncture methods differed across the seven analysed trials, a factor that future research could standardise.

Researchers will also need to investigate more closely the chemical processes responsible for the neural rewiring. This will require biological information beyond brain scans alone and could help reveal how acupuncture's benefits might be improved further.

Related: There Are Actually 2 Biologically Distinct Forms of Major Depression, Says New Study

"Future work should integrate molecular biomarkers with longitudinal neuroimaging to unravel acupuncture's systems-level mechanisms and to advance personalized neuromodulation strategies for depression," write the researchers.

The research was published in Medicine.

This article was fact-checked and edited by Fiona MacDonald. While we take pride in our process, we are only human. If you notice an error, please let us know.