Imagine wearing a helmet with tiny electrodes attached to your scalp that deliver a gentle electric current to certain areas of your brain. After about 10 to 20 minutes, you may find yourself with better, sharper focus memory and a host of other cognitive benefits.
That’s the idea behind a promising experimental treatment that could be applied to a wide range of people, from airplane pilots looking to gain a cognitive advantage to athletes trying to up the game. play their mind for patients with dementia.
Image credit: University of Alberta
Mathieu Figeys, an emergency room nurse graduated from A . University Nursing Faculty in 2016 and is currently a PhD candidate in Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicinewas part of an interdisciplinary research group led by Professor Esther Kim at the University of Alberta examining the implications and potential applications of new treatments.
“It’s very well tolerated, the current is minimal, so we know it’s very safe in terms of safety,” says Figeys. “We’re now in the field of determining what it does in different populations.”
In the treatment, known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a researcher attaches electrodes to a patient’s scalp to deliver an electric current as low as one to two milliamperes. Figeys likens the overall experience to an electrical nerve stimulator commonly used for physical therapy.
“I’ve had people say it’s like a slight stinging sensation, almost like a slight tattooing sensation.”
TDCS isn’t the first treatment that uses electrical currents to stimulate the brain for positive benefits. Some treatments, such as implanting a device to deliver deep brain stimulation, which can help people living with disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. However, they are invasive and require an experienced neurosurgeon. TDCS is noninvasive and many clinical researchers, including nurse scientists, can perform it.
“When we stimulate the brain, we make the neurons work more efficiently. It is also thought that we can also change blood flow to those neurons,” says Figeys. Increased blood flow to certain areas of the brain, he explains, often goes hand in hand with increased cognition.
This area of research is relatively new – according to Figeys, researchers didn’t really notice it until the early 2000s. While researchers know the technology is safe for most people, Figeys note that they have excluded several groups so far with caution, including people with seizure disorders, people taking drugs that affect nerve cells in a particular way, or anyone with a a deep brain stimulator or an implanted pacemaker.
While people have cognitive differences based on age or other health factors, Figeys said the treatment could work for many groups, including healthy adults looking to boost their effectiveness. their performance in difficult circumstances, such as military pilot, NBA player and track and field athlete.
Figeys and his collaborators in Department of Communication and Disorders Sciences performed several studies looking at tDCS in different populations. In one learn, they stimulated the brain of a person with aphasia, a disorder of spoken language, after a stroke. As a result, patients can complete their script training, a protocol that speech-language pathologists use with aphasia patients, potentially at a faster rate.
In an upcoming study, the U of A team found that tDCS increased executive functioning processes of inhibition and cognitive flexibility in elderly patients with depression or worried. Another study, to be published this summer, found that healthy young adults between the ages of 18 and 36 who received a single course of tDCS significantly enhanced cognition and blood oxygenation to the organs. specific regions of the brain.
“It increased their cognitive performance in the cognitive area known as working memory, with an increase in oxygen in the excitatory prefrontal cortex at the back,” Figeys said, with the session. The 20-minute tDCS boosted participants’ performance on the working memory test by 13% more.
Figeys notes that working memory is one of the cognitive processes affected early in many disorders including Alzheimer’s dementia, making it an exciting area to see positive results. .
Similar studies have shown cognitive benefits from a single session that can last from 10 minutes to an hour. But as Figeys explains, there is also research showing that the effects may last longer when a person receives repeated treatments.
“It can be used in almost any brain disorder I can think of, in a way,” says Figeys. “Many clinical populations – such as in stroke recovery, chronic pain, mental health populations – and also healthy populations.”
The source: University of Alberta
