INTRODUCTION
neurological diseases, Acupuncture, TCM
NEUROLOGICAL DISEASE, DISEASES
Acupuncture is an important component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and has been accepted as an effective therapy for many diseases, especially neurological diseases (Thirthalli et al., Recently, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been widely utilized to explain changes in brain connectivity after EAS (Mawla et al., In clinical practice, acupuncture treatment usually involves a combination of at least two acupuncture points. Thus, investigation into the relationships between needling and the cerebral network should involve a combination of acupuncture points (Zhang et al., Now, the immediate effects of EAS on scalp acupoints were not clear. We hypothesized that EAS at scalp acupoints would immediately change the brain functional connectivity. Therefore, we designed a randomized controlled study to explore the immediate effect of EAS at the scalp acupoints Shenting (GV24) and Touwei (ST8) by BOLD fMRI and independent component analysis (ICA) method.