A neurophysiological insight into use of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation as potential therapeutic tool in Parkinson’s disease

Giorgio Fuggetta, Marco Sandrini, Chiara Arcaro, Michele Tinazzi, Paolo Manganotti

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Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients show pronounced slowing of resting-state oscillatory brain activity compared to healthy controls. In addition, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has shown to have possible therapeutic effects on motor symptoms of PD. However, the precise electrophysiological mechanisms behind these effects are unknown. In this cross-over, sham-controlled study, 15 off-drugs PD patients underwent two sessions where active or sham high-frequency rTMS at 10 Hz was performed on the primary motor cortex (M1). Active rTMS, improved overall motor performance and induced an increase of oscillatory activity with a shift of EEG low α peak towards higher frequencies 30 minutes after active brain stimulation. The pattern of brain rhythm modulations suggests that 10 Hz rTMS over M1 seems to be able to act on the thalamo-cortical resonance interplay entraining neural oscillations at the same frequency, in association with a clinical improvement of motor performance in PD.

© 2020, International Society of Neuroscience Publishing Company Lt. This is an author produced version of a paper accepted for publication in HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND BRAIN. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Original languageEnglish
JournalHuman Behaviour and Brain
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Apr 2020

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