Chronic atrophic gastritis (CAG) is a common digestive disease in clinic. Previous experimental and clinical studies have shown that acupuncture has a positive effect for CAG. Apoptosis of gastric mucosal tissue has been shown to play an important role in the process of gastric atrophy and possibly further carcinogenesis in CAG, and the circular RNA (circRNA), a novel class of non-coding RNA, has been confirmed to play a regulatory role in the downstream pathway of apoptosis by many stu-dies. Accumulated findings of experimental studies showed that acupuncture and moxibustion interventions could suppress apoptosis of the cultured human gastric mucosal epithelial cells and lower apoptotic index of gastric mucosal cells in CAG rats. Therefore, circRNA is likely to mediate the inhibitory effect of acupuncture and moxibustion on apoptosis of gastric mucosal epithelial cells in CAG. In this paper, we systematically summarized 1) the regulation of circRNA on apoptosis, 2) the apoptosis and pathological mechanism of CAG, 3) the effect of acupuncture on apoptosis, and proposed that circRNA is highly likely to be involved in the positive effect of acupuncture and moxibustion interventions for CAG. It is recommended that researches should further reveal the scientific basis of acupuncture and moxibustion therapies in the treatment of CAG by exploring the role of related circRNAs and their downstream target proteins in the gastric mucosal tissues.
Keywords: Acupuncture-moxibustion; Apoptosis; Chronic atrophic gastritis; Circular RNA; Gastric mucosal tissue.