Evaluating the potential of acupuncture for Alzheimer’s disease treatment: A meta-analysis and systematic review of mouse model studies

TL;DR

This paper reviews mouse studies to evaluate how acupuncture, specifically electroacupuncture, affects Alzheimer’s disease pathology and cognitive function.

Contribution

The study provides a meta-analysis and systematic review of electroacupuncture effects on Alzheimer’s disease in mouse models.

Findings

Electroacupuncture reduces amyloid-beta and phosphorylated tau levels in AD mouse models.

EA decreases neuroinflammatory biomarkers like activated microglia and astrocytes.

EA improves cognitive functions in Alzheimer’s disease mouse models.

Abstract

Acupuncture is an ancient practice that was developed within the framework of traditional Chinese medicine. While acupuncture has been recently proposed as a therapy for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), acupuncture effects are not well understood in terms of neural mechanisms. Here, we review and examine the studies that used AD mouse models and analyze the experiments where researchers administered electroacupuncture (EA) to AD mice to assess the potential therapeutic impact of acupuncture on disease pathology and cognitive function in controlled laboratory settings. We analyzed 29 relevant PubMed articles published between January 2014 and July 2025. Our results reveal that EA significantly reduces both amyloid-beta (Aβ) and phosphorylated tau (p-tau) levels and neuroinflammatory biomarkers, including molecular signatures for activated microglia and astrocytes in the brain. EA also enhances cognitive functions. While no study directly compared acupoint strategies, the indirect comparisons in our network analysis suggest that GV20 has potential as a therapeutic target for AD. Our present meta-analysis and review of literature add to the evidence of integrative health practices for acupuncture-based Alzheimer’s disease treatment.

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