INTRODUCTION
postoperative pain, human diseases, acute postoperative pain, acute pain, Tu, knee osteoarthritis, pain, knee arthroplasty, KOA, TKA, migraine
DISORDERS, CHRONIC PAIN, MIGRAINE, KNEE OSTEOARTHRITIS
Total knee arthroplasty (TKA) can effectively treat end‐stage knee osteoarthritis (KOA) by reducing pain and helping patients to resume daily life activities. Acute postoperative pain after TKA prolongs rehabilitation duration, weakens the therapeutic effect, and thereby decreases the patient's quality of life. Intense postoperative pain is associated with chronic pain, and it may also prolong rehabilitation duration, weaken the therapeutic effect of TKA, and thereby decrease the patient's quality of life (Coppes et al., Acupuncture, a methodology of treating human diseases in China with a history of more than 3000 years, has been applied to various pain disorders, such as migraine (Tu et al., Resting‐state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs‐fMRI), which gauges fluctuations in the blood oxygen level‐dependent signal, is widely used to explore the neural mechanisms, assess the efficacy of acupuncture treatment, and it is also commonly used for pain research. The amplitude of low‐frequency fluctuation (ALFF), which depicts the intensity of regional spontaneous neuronal activities, strikes a good balance between test‐retest reliability and replicability (Chen et al., In this study, we used rs‐fMRI to explore the brain central mechanism of EA in treating acute pain following TKA. To our knowledge, few neuroimaging research has focused on this area. We speculated that (1) the ALFF patterns in patients with acute postoperative pain might be abnormal, and (2) EA could treat acute pain after TKA by regulating the functional activities of specific brain regions.