Trans-Cranial Direct Current Stimulation

Re:Trans-Cranial Direct Current Stimulation by dave_sullivan on Saturday July 05, 2014 @12:09PM (#7992242)

Could anyone recommend a good recent-ish survey paper of the applicable research in this field? Seems like there's quite a bit going on, but mostly I see news with no real content or papers behind a paywall.

I assume there's a few factors driving growth in this area, what are they? Maybe it's just literally cheaper access to powerful imaging devices?

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Re:Trans-Cranial Direct Current Stimulation by caycep on Saturday July 05, 2014 @12:51PM (#7992358)

I have to look myself, it's not really what I spend most of my time in, but I heard a talk by Gottfried Schlaug from BIDMC in Boston and he made a few comments, may be useful to pubmed him and see if he's written any reviews or editorials.

tDCS is still an emerging tech, and I think not a lot of people have figured out how to do it. Transcranial magnetic stim has been around a lot longer. I don't think people really know the best way to do that either, but there's more experimental data showing that if you do it via certain methods/paradigms, you get a measurable experimental effect of some sort (usually a muscle jerk measured in the arm, or maybe performance on some standardized cognitive/motor skills test, etc).

The problem is that no one is exactly sure what it does. Most groups do not have an IRB to study this in tissue - getting animal IACUC approval is hard, and in humans, without a good medical reason to go through the cranium, forget about it... (i.e. most of the neurophysiology data we know today, aside from in animals, is from opportunities to record data in surgeries for epilepsy or DBS surgery of Parkinson's disease).

So for lack of a better term, the holy mantra of "neuroplasticity" is involved for a hand-wavy explanation of effect...

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Re:Trans-Cranial Direct Current Stimulation by ridgeguy on Saturday July 05, 2014 @02:13PM (#7992558)

Here are a few reviews of TCDCS with emphasis on different clinical issues: major depression, fibromyalgia, stroke, etc. Sorry these are paywalled, but the full text may be available with a bit of searching.

Caumo, W. (2012). Neurobiological effects of transcranial direct current stimulation: a review, 1–11. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2012.00110/abstract

Berlim, M. T., Van den Eynde, F., & Daskalakis, Z. J. (2012). Clinical utility of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) for treating major depression: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, double-blind and sham-controlled trials. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 1–7. doi:10.1016/j.jpsychires.2012.09.025

Marlow, N. M., Bonilha, H. S., & Short, E. B. (2012). Efficacy of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation for Treating Fibromyalgia Syndrome: A Systematic Review. Pain Practice, no–no. doi:10.1111/j.1533-2500.2012.00562.x

Madhavan, S. (2012). Enhancing motor skill learning with transcranial direct current stimulation – a concise review with applications to stroke, 1–9. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2012.00066/abstract

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