Pain-related negative emotions including anxiety, depression, and pain-aversive memory are closely associated with structural and functional alterations in central neural circuits. The reviewed article frames pain-related emotions as arising from changes in defined brain pathways and summarizes how acupuncture may regulate these circuits to reduce negative emotional states associated with pain.
The review reports that acupuncture can effectively alleviate pain-related emotions and reduce associated negative states such as anxiety, depression, and pain-aversive memory. The authors link these clinical and behavioral effects to acupuncture’s regulatory effects on the activity of specific neural circuits, proposing circuit-level mechanisms that may underlie analgesic and affective benefits.
The review identifies several circuits associated with anxiety that are modulated by acupuncture:
According to the review, acupuncture may exert analgesic and anxiolytic effects through a combination of inhibiting some rACC-originating glutamatergic projections (rACCGlu→Th and rACCGlu→vlPAG) while activating other pathways (rACCGlu→DRN, BLACaMKII→rACC, and VTADA→NAc). The abstract presents these directional effects as a synthesis of the literature covered in the review.
The review highlights a depression-related circuit centered on the infralimbic cortex (IL): infralimbic cortex CaMKIIα-positive neurons projecting to the basolateral amygdala (ILCaMKIIα+→BLA). The authors suggest that acupuncture may produce analgesic and antidepressant effects by suppressing this particular pathway.
A circuit implicated in pain-aversive memory and reward is described as infralimbic cortex glutamatergic projections to the nucleus accumbens (ILGlu→NAc). The review proposes that activation of the ILGlu→NAc pathway by acupuncture may underlie both analgesic effects and the regulation of pain-associated aversive memory and reward processing.
The review synthesizes the literature to propose mechanistic patterns by which acupuncture affects pain-related emotions at the circuit level:
These proposed directional effects reflect the authors’ synthesis of experimental and translational findings reported in the review.
The article is a review published in Zhen Ci Yan Jiu (2026 Aug 25;51(8):1106–1112) with free full text and includes 76 references. The review is indexed with MeSH terms including Acupuncture Therapy, Emotions, Pain Management/psychology, Pain/physiopathology, Animals, and Humans, indicating coverage of both preclinical and clinical/translational work. The abstract summarizes circuit-level conclusions but does not provide primary-data figures or quantitative results in the abstract itself.
The authors present the circuit-level synthesis as a reference for both research and clinical application. By mapping specific circuits linked to anxiety, depression, and pain-aversive memory, the review aims to guide future mechanistic research and to inform interpretation of acupuncture’s behavioral effects in pain contexts. The framework links canonical affective nodes (rACC, IL, BLA, DRN, vlPAG, VTA, NAc) to observable analgesic and emotional outcomes after acupuncture interventions.
The abstract-format summary in PubMed presents the circuit-level conclusions without experimental detail; full-method descriptions, effect sizes, animal versus human evidence breakdown, stimulation parameters, and temporal dynamics are contained within the full review and its cited references. The review consolidates published findings but the abstract does not enumerate study-by-study limitations, heterogeneity in methods, or the translational gaps from animal models to clinical practice—readers should consult the full text and cited studies for those specifics.
All authors declared no conflict of interest. The authors are affiliated with the Acupuncture and Tuina School, Gansu University of Chinese Medicine, Lanzhou, China. The article DOI is 10.13702/j.1000-0607.20250612 and PubMed ID is 42621721. The review is presented in Chinese with an English abstract and is intended to serve as a reference for neural circuit mechanisms underlying acupuncture treatment of pain-related emotions.