Dataset Information

Modulation of cortical activity by transcranial direct current stimulation in patients with affective disorder.

ABSTRACT: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to have antidepressant efficacy in patients experiencing a major depressive episode, but little is known about the underlying neurophysiology. The purpose of our study was to investigate the acute effects of tDCS on cortical activity using electroencephalography (EEG) in patients with an affective disorder. Eighteen patients diagnosed with an affective disorder and experiencing a depressive episode participated in a sham-controlled study of tDCS, each receiving a session of active (2 mA for 20 minutes) and sham tDCS to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The effects of tDCS on EEG activity were assessed after each session using event-related potentials (ERP) and measurement of spectral activity during a visual working memory (VWM) task. We observed task and intervention dependent effects on both ERPs and task-related alpha and theta activity, where active compared to sham stimulation resulted in a significant reduction in the N2 amplitude and reduced theta activity over frontal areas during memory retrieval. In summary a single session of anodal tDCS stimulation to the left DLPFC during a major depressive episode resulted in modulated brain activity evident in task-related EEG. Effects on the N2 and frontal theta activity likely reflect modulated activity in the medial frontal cortex and hence indicate that the after-effects of tDCS extend beyond the direct focal effects to the left DLPFC.

SUBMITTER: Powell TY

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4051608 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Modulation of cortical activity by transcranial direct current stimulation in patients with affective disorder.

Powell Tamara Y TY Boonstra Tjeerd W TW Martin Donel M DM Loo Colleen K CK Breakspear Michael M

PloS one 20140610 6

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to have antidepressant efficacy in patients experiencing a major depressive episode, but little is known about the underlying neurophysiology. The purpose of our study was to investigate the acute effects of tDCS on cortical activity using electroencephalography (EEG) in patients with an affective disorder. Eighteen patients diagnosed with an affective disorder and experiencing a depressive episode participated in a sham-controlled st ...[more]

PMID: 24914953

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Project description:Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to enhance cognitive performance on a variety of tasks. It is hypothesized that tDCS enhances performance by affecting task related cortical excitability changes in networks underlying or connected to the site of stimulation facilitating long term potentiation. However, many recent studies have called into question the reliability and efficacy of tDCS to induce modulatory changes in brain activity. In this study, our goal is to investigate the individual differences in tDCS induced modulatory effects on brain activity related to the degree of enhancement in performance, providing insight into this lack of reliability. In accomplishing this goal, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) concurrently with tDCS stimulation (1 mA, 30 minutes duration) using a visual search task simulating real world conditions. The experiment consisted of three fMRI sessions: pre-training (no performance feedback), training (performance feedback which included response accuracy and target location and either real tDCS or sham stimulation given), and post-training (no performance feedback). The right posterior parietal cortex was selected as the site of anodal tDCS based on its known role in visual search and spatial attention processing. Our results identified a region in the right precentral gyrus, known to be involved with visual spatial attention and orienting, that showed tDCS induced task related changes in cortical excitability that were associated with individual differences in improved performance. This same region showed greater activity during the training session for target feedback of incorrect (target-error feedback) over correct trials for the tDCS stim over sham group indicating greater attention to target features during training feedback when trials were incorrect. These results give important insight into the nature of neural excitability induced by tDCS as it relates to variability in individual differences in improved performance shedding some light the apparent lack of reliability found in tDCS research.

Project description:Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder often demonstrate impairments in action-outcome monitoring. Passivity phenomena and hallucinations, in particular, have been related to impairments of efference copy-based predictions which are relevant for the monitoring of outcomes produced by voluntary action. Frontal transcranial direct current stimulation has been shown to improve action-outcome monitoring in healthy subjects. However, whether transcranial direct current stimulation can improve action monitoring in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder remains unknown. We investigated whether transcranial direct current stimulation can improve the detection of temporal action-outcome discrepancies in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder. On 4 separate days, we applied sham or left cathodal/right anodal transcranial direct current stimulation in a randomized order to frontal (F3/F4), parietal (CP3/CP4) and frontoparietal (F3/CP4) areas of 19 patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder and 26 healthy control subjects. Action-outcome monitoring was assessed subsequent to 10 min of sham/transcranial direct current stimulation (1.5 mA). After a self-generated (active) or externally generated (passive) key press, subjects were presented with a visual outcome (a dot on the screen), which was presented after various delays (0-417 ms). Participants had to detect delays between the key press and the visual consequence. Symptom subgroups were explored based on the presence or absence of symptoms related to a paranoid-hallucinatory syndrome. In general, delay-detection performance was impaired in the schizophrenia spectrum disorder compared to the healthy control group. Interaction analyses showed group-specific (schizophrenia spectrum disorder versus healthy control group) and symptom-specific (with/without relevant paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms) transcranial direct current stimulation effects. Post hoc tests revealed that frontal transcranial direct current stimulation improved the detection of long delays in active conditions and reduced the proportion of false alarms in undelayed trials of the passive condition in patients. The patients with no or few paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms benefited especially from frontal transcranial direct current stimulation in active conditions, while improvement in the patients with paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms was predominantly reflected in reduced false alarm rates in passive conditions. These data provide some first evidence for the potential utility of transcranial direct current stimulation in improving efference copy mechanisms and action-outcome monitoring in schizophrenia spectrum disorder. Current data indicate that improving efference copy-related processes can be especially effective in patients with no or few positive symptoms, while intersensory matching (i.e. task-relevant in passive conditions) could be more susceptible to improvement in patients with paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms.

Dataset Information

Modulation of cortical activity by transcranial direct current stimulation in patients with affective disorder.

Publications

Modulation of cortical activity by transcranial direct current stimulation in patients with affective disorder.

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