A Narrative Literature Review on the Effectiveness of Qigong Therapy for Cognitive Impairment: Focusing on the Neuroimaging Studies

The purpose of this study was to investigate the current state of clinical studies of qigong therapies for cognitive impairment using neuroimaging method. We searched for clinical trials of qigong therapies for cognitive impairment using neuroimaging method in the MEDLINE (Pubmed) and CNKI on October 18, 2024. Once the online search was finished, studies were selected manually by the inclusion criteria. Finally, we analyzed the characteristics of selected articles and reviewed the neural substrates of qigong therapies in cognitive impairment. Total six studies were included in this study. The most frequently utilized modality was functional MRI. The qigong therapies applied in the study were Tai chi and Baduanjin. Looking at the selected studies, there were many cases that the control group included controls who did not perform any interventions other than health education and an active control group that performed brisk walking. It was confirmed that Qigong therapy can improve cognitive function more broadly, including MoCA scores, compared to the general control group or walking group. Moreover, several studies revealed that qigong therapies could regulate brain activation centered on medial temporal lobe, frontal areas, parietal lobes, attention-related brain networks, and brainstem including neurotransmitter-related nuclei. Through the analysis, we demonstrated that neuroimaging techniques could explore the neural mechanisms of qigong therapies on cognitive impairment. We hope that this perspective on the effectiveness of qigong therapy using neuroimaging methods would be helpful in performing future clinical researches on the mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease in the traditional Korean medicine.