Tuesday, February 18, 2020

TMS and other neurological disease states

In 2017, an article in the New York Times called "New Electrical Brain Stimulation Technique Shows Promise in Mice" was published. In this article, Pam Belluck spoke of a cutting-edge new approach that she believes can aid patients that are suffering from Parkinson's disease, OCD, depression, and more. This is due to something called "temporal interference." In temporal interference, electrical impulses that can be administered at different frequencies. They found that if they administered frequencies that are too high and fast, the neurons will thus not be able to respond to them. However, at the location where the currents crossed paths, the neurons responded. This is because if there are two high frequency currents intersecting, they will cancel each other out and only the difference will be left. This differs from TMS, which is talked about in Amy Herrold's paper, because it does not affected ay surrounding areas in the brain. It allows scientists to pinpoint a certain location that they want to specifically target.

In Amy Herrold's research paper, she proposed that TMS is a somewhat effective method in which AUD, PTSD, and depression can be treated. She concludes, however, with the suggestion that more research on humans must be done to see the final results.

Both of these methods are very interesting because they are both non-invasive treatments that can potentially treat neurological and neurodegenerative diseases that are not commonly an easy fix for patients. On the other hand, they both also have complications in their administrations and long-term affects. For temporal interference, it is hard to treat complex diseases such as Parkinson's because that would require constant electrical stimulation, which can be difficult to manage. For TMS, the diseases that Herrold was talking about are difficult to measure due to methods of determining depressive states can be highly subjective.

Regardless, of those issues, I think that it would be great to conduct more research and gather more data in order to find how these two methods can be used to potentially help neurological diseases that have yet to have a legitimate cure.


Article about temporal interference:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/health/new-electrical-brain-stimulation-technique-shows-promise-in-mice.html?searchResultPosition=8

Amy Herrold's paper on TMS and co-occurring neurological diseases:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hdluh1vfs2cphhz/AABHUOxPAP_XWzl0AL7lWWzga/(01.21.20)%20-%20Amy%20Herrold?dl=0&preview=Herrold+2014+Neural+Regeneration+Research+TMS+Review.pdf&subfolder_nav_tracking=1

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