Study Reveals Clues to Understanding Brain Stimulation

In a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) found that brain networks — the interconnected pathways that link brain circuits to one another — can help guide the site selection for brain stimulation therapies. Divided into two broad approaches, invasive and non-invasive, brain stimulation works by targeting specific sites to adjust brain activity. Brain stimulation can result in dramatic benefit to patients with disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor, causing researchers to test whether it can also help patients with other diseases. During the study, researchers led a team to conduct a large-scale literature search in order to help identify all neurological and psychiatric diseases where improvement had been seen with both invasive and non-invasive brain stimulation. Their analysis revealed 14 conditions: addiction, Alzheimer’s disease, anorexia, depression, dystonia, epilepsy, essential tremor, gait dysfunction, Huntington’s disease, minimally conscious state, obsessive compulsive disorder, pain, Parkinson’s disease and Tourette syndrome. They next listed the stimulation sites, either deep in the brain or on the surface of the brain, thought to be effective for the treatment of each of the 14 diseases. “We wanted to test the hypothesis that these various stimulation sites are actually different spots within the same brain network,” explained the study’s lead author. From the correlations, the researchers were able to create a map of connections from deep brain stimulation sites to the surface of the brain. When they compared this map to sites on the brain’s surface which also work for non-invasive stimulation, the two matched. To read more about this study, click here.