rTMS

Expectations and beliefs modulate the experience of pain, which is particularly evident in placebo analgesia. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been associated with pain regulation and with the generation, maintenance and manipulation of cognitive representations, consistent with its role in expectation. In a heat-pain paradigm, we employed non-invasive low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to transiently disrupt left and right DLPFC function or used the TMS device itself as a placebo, before applying an expectation-induced placebo analgesia. The results demonstrated that placebo significantly increased pain threshold and pain tolerance. While rTMS did not affect pain experience, it completely blocked placebo analgesia. These findings suggest that expectation-induced placebo analgesia is mediated by symmetric prefrontal cortex function.

Background: Autism is a mental developmental disorder, manifested in the early childhood. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is another psychiatric condition of the neurodevelopmental type. Both disorders affect information processing in the nervous system, altering the mechanisms which control how neurons and their synapses are connected and organized.
Purpose: To examine if quantitative EEG assessment is sensitive and simple enough to differentiate autism from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and neurologically typical children.
Material and methods: Quantitative EEG is a type of electrophysiological assessment that uses computerized mathematical analysis to convert the raw waveform data into different frequency ranges. Each frequency range is averaged across a sample of data and quantified into mean amplitude (voltage in microvolts mV). We performed quantitative EEG analysis and compared 4 cohorts of children (aged from 3 to 7 years): with autism (high [n=27] and low [n=52] functioning), with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [n=34], and with typical behaviour [n75].
Results: Our preliminary results show that there are significant qEEG differences between the groups of patients and the control cohort. The changes affect the potential levels of delta-, theta-, alpha-, and beta- frequency spectrums.
Conclusion: The present study shows some significant quantitative EEG findings in autistic patients. This is a step forward in our efforts, aimed at defining specific neurophysiologic changes, in order to develop and refine strategies for early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders, differentiation from other development conditions in childhood, detection of specific biomarkers and early initiation of treatment.
Keywords: Autistic spectrum disorder, Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Quantitative electroencephalography

Conclusion: The study showed that combined repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on the auditory cortex and prefrontal cortex has more benefit than rTMS on the auditory cortex alone for tinnitus control in patients with depression. Further studies for the most optimal combination of stimulation on both areas are needed. Objective: Recent studies suggest that the neuronal network changes of chronic tinnitus are beyond the auditory pathway. There is increasing evidences for the application of rTMS on multiple brain cortices in addition to the auditory cortex for the treatment of tinnitus. Sequential rTMS was performed on the auditory cortex alone as well as the auditory cortex combined with prefrontal cortex in patients with both chronic tinnitus and depression. Methods: Patients who presented with chronic tinnitus of more than 1 year were enrolled in the present study (seven males, four females; mean age 54 years). To select the site for the rTMS, PET CT was performed. Patients received the first rTMS on the primary auditory cortex for 5 days and on the primary auditory cortex and prefrontal cortex in the second application after tinnitus relapse. The Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI), visual analog scale (VAS), and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were evaluated before and after rTMS. Results: The mean THI score of the eight patients with depression changed from 77.5 ± 15 to 61.8 ± 20.1 after the second rTMS. There was statistical significance only for the second rTMS. The VAS score changed from 8.6 ± 1.6 to 6.3 ± 1.8 after the first rTMS and from 7.6 ± 2.4 to 4.6 ± 2.7 after the second rTMS, showing statistically significant changes both times. The THI changes after the second rTMS were greater than after the first rTMS, and the changes in VAS score showed a similar pattern. The changes in BDI score, which indicates the severity of depression, showed a variable pattern after rTMS. Patients with mild depression (10£ BDI score <16, n = 4) showed significant improvement of THI with the second combined rTMS (DTHI = 24.5) as compared with the first rTMS on the auditory area (DTHI = 6). In contrast, combined rTMS did not show any better improvement on THI (DTHI = 6.5) than the first rTMS on the auditory cortex (DTHI = 7) in patients without depression (BDI <10, n = 3) and patients with moderate to severe depression (BDI ‡16, n = 4).

Bodily Relativity: The body-specificity of language and thought Daniel Casasanto (casasand@newschool.edu) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Nijmegen, NL The New School for Social Research, New York, USA Abstract Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto 2009), they should. In this paper, I review evidence that right- and left-handers, who perform actions in systematically dif- ferent ways, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for imagining actions and representing the meanings of action verbs. Beyond the concrete domain of action, the way people use their hands influences the way they represent abstract ideas with positive and negative emotional valence like “goodness,” “honesty,” and “intelligence,” and how they communicate about them in spontaneous speech and gesture. Changing how people use their right and left hands can c...

This paper responds to the call for the incorporation of neurological methods into the empirical study of literature – more specifically, into empirical narratology. Two non-invasive brain stimulating techniques (TMS and tDCS) are discussed as potentially fruitful tools to explore narrative reception. Very briefly, the technical fundamentals are sketched out. Advantages and limitations are taken into consideration before deriving potential fields of application.

Background and Purpose: Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) induces widespread changes in brain connectivity. As the network topology differences induced by a single session of rTMS are less known we undertook this study to ascertain whether the network alterations had a small-world morphology using multi-modal graph theory analysis of simultaneous EEG-fMRI. Method: Simultaneous EEG-fMRI was acquired in duplicate before (R1) and after (R2) a single session of rTMS in 14 patients with Writer's Cramp (WC). Whole brain neuronal and hemodynamic network connectivity were explored using the graph theory measures and clustering coefficient, path length and small-world index were calculated for EEG and resting state fMRI (rsfMRI). Multi-modal graph theory analysis was used to evaluate the correlation of EEG and fMRI clustering coefficients. Result: A single session of rTMS was found to increase the clustering coefficient and small-worldness significantly in both EEG and fMRI (p < 0.05). Multi-modal graph theory analysis revealed significant modulations in the fronto-parietal regions immediately after rTMS. The rsfMRI revealed additional modulations in several deep brain regions including cerebellum, insula and medial frontal lobe. Conclusion: Multi-modal graph theory analysis of simultaneous EEG-fMRI can supplement motor physiology methods in understanding the neurobiology of rTMS in vivo. Coinciding evidence from EEG and rsfMRI reports small-world morphology for the acute phase network hyper-connectivity indicating changes ensuing low-frequency rTMS is probably not " noise " .

Question
Noninvasive cortical stimulation techniques such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) are capable of increasing and decreasing cortical excitability and thereby might be clinically relevant for rehabilitation of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. However, the induced after-effects are usually too short-lasting to be clinically relevant. In this study we investigated if combining rTMS with operant learning can induce long-lasting after-effects not achievable neither with rTMS alone nor with operant learning alone.

This paper responds to the call for the incorporation of neurological methods into the empirical study of literature – more specifically, into empirical narratology. Two non-invasive brain stimulating techniques (TMS and tDCS) are discussed as potentially fruitful tools to explore narrative reception. Very briefly, the technical fundamentals are sketched out. Advantages and limitations are taken into consideration before deriving potential fields of application.