Fariba Saddadi - nuclear medicine specialist as consultant physician
Rea Shokouhizadeh - radiologist

Background and Aim : Qigong practice is known as moving meditation with deep breathing and some gentle exercise which shows it is good for mental and body health .There are many different qigong exercise and we consider the shibafa series one for our patients and decide to evaluate this exercise meditation effect on brain disease by using functional imaging modality of brain SPECT imaging.Methods : 32 patients 20 male and 12 female with age range 15-80 years old were enrolled at this study and patients had different brain disease like 4 depression, 10 dementia,8 unknown tinnitus , 2 Parkinson, 4 CVA,1 OCD, 3 head trauma. And the most important criteria for this study was cooperation of patients to perform shibafa qigong exercise and meditation. Two series of Tc99m -ECD brain SPECT were performed for each patients as standard protocols, first as a basal scan and second images was obtained after practicing shibafa qigong meditation during 0.5-1 hours, and this scan was performed as the same as the first image with the same conditions. Both series of brain SPECT were evaluated for any reduction of tracer uptake in right and left side for all brain cortical lobes (frontal-parietal-temporal- occipital) and basal ganglia as well. The ROI also were drawn for any brain lobes and basal ganglia to find quantitatively the mean perfusion brain ratio and a comparison study between pre- and post- gigong exercise meditation was obtained.Results : The results simply shows that the mean cortical perfusion defect ratio in pre –qigong was 0.62 which after shibafa qigong exercise meditation it improved as mean 0.89. It means that there is an improvement of 6-9 % for increasing brain cortex perfusion after qigong exercise even during a limited time of meditation.Conclusion : That is interesting to know that subjectively all patients claim better brain function and almost all were satisfied with this meditation excercise. Shibafa qigong makes a better function and perfusion of brain and helps patients to reset her brain mechanism of thinking and cognition and brain SPECT is a good imaging modality to confirm the treatment response.

shibafa,qigong, brain SPECT