A new study from Parker’s lab and the lab of Nandakumar Narayanan at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine finds that stimulating the cerebellum in rats with schizophrenia-like thinking problems normalizes brain activity in the frontal cortex and corrects the rats’ ability to estimate the passage of time - a cognitive deficit that is characteristic in people with schizophrenia.
“Cerebellar interactions with the frontal cortex in cognitive processes has never been shown before in animal models,” says Parker, UI assistant professor of psychiatry and the first faculty hire of the new Iowa Neuroscience Institute. “In addition to showing that the signal travels from the cerebellum to the frontal cortex, the study also showed that normal timing behavior was rescued when the signal was restored.”
The UI study, which was published March 28 online in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, adds to the accumulating evidence, including recent human studies from Harvard University, that suggests cerebellar stimulation might help improve cognitive problems in patients with schizophrenia.
Yes, I used tDCS for negative symptoms and it didn’t work. Maybe it worked for cognition ? I don’t know for sure, because my cognitive abilities are unaffected by illness.
@Andrey Awhile back @firemonkey posted an article about brain scans in sz people with predominant negative symptoms, and it identified 3 areas that were different in those patient’s brains. I don’t remember what those parts were but possibly it’s not the same part of the brain they were stimulating here.
@twinklestars rest assured, I followed the exact protocol used by the German researchers in their study. Yet nothing good happened, except I got two burns on my forehead after several days.
I’m pretty dilligent with everything related to my illness: medication, therapy, brain stimulation etc.
If there was something out there that worked for negative symptoms, I’d know by now and I’d probably have tried it already and I’d be at least partially cured. That’s not the case unfortunately.
Since I don’t have depression, I wouldn’t know if tdcs was effective for it… All I can say is I didn’t feel any change, be it good or bad. I did ten sessions over two weeks, 20 minutes per session.
Yes, at the beginning of each session there was a bright flash of light in my right eye. This effect has been documented and is harmless. Apart from that, I didn’t feel anything at all. Some people say they feel a metallic taste in their mouth, I didn’t.