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Does High-Frequency Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Produce Residual and/or Cumulative Effects Within an Experimental Session?

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Abstract

A common procedure for studying the effects on cognition of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is to deliver rTMS concurrent with task performance, and to compare task performance on these trials versus on trials without rTMS. Recent evidence that TMS can have effects on neural activity that persist longer than the experimental session itself, however, raise questions about the assumption of the transient nature of rTMS that underlies many concurrent (or “online”) rTMS designs. To our knowledge, there have been no studies in the cognitive domain examining whether the application of brief trains of rTMS during specific epochs of a complex task may have effects that spill over into subsequent task epochs, and perhaps into subsequent trials. We looked for possible immediate spill-over and longer-term cumulative effects of rTMS in data from two studies of visual short-term delayed recognition. In 54 subjects, 10-Hz rTMS trains were applied to five different brain regions during the 3-s delay period of a spatial task, and in a second group of 15 subjects, electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded while 10-Hz rTMS was applied to two brain areas during the 3-s delay period of both spatial and object tasks. No evidence for immediate effects was found in the comparison of the memory probe-evoked response on trials that were vs. were not preceded by delay-period rTMS. No evidence for cumulative effects was found in analyses of behavioral performance, and of EEG signal, as a function of task block. The implications of these findings, and their relation to the broader literature on acute vs. long-lasting effects of rTMS, are considered.

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Notes

  1. For procedures that are intended to have long-lasting clinical effects, such as the treatment of depression, achieving long-lasting effects is, of course, an important goal of the intervention.

  2. Except for 12 subjects in the rTMS-only experiment, for all subjects the stimulation intensity was corrected for scalp-cortex distance (Stokes et al. 2005). For the remaining 12 subjects, rTMS was applied at 110% MT at all brain areas targeted.

  3. Similar analyses have been used to assess delay-period EEG activity as a function of, for example, visual short-term memory capacity (Vogel and Machizawa 2004) or the number of items held in visual short-term memory (Vogel et al. 2005).

  4. To avoid contamination by neurophysiological signals reflecting either the initial orienting response seen at the beginning of the delay, or overlap with probe-related activity following the delay, our analyses focused on the 5th through 29th pulses in the 30-pulse train.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Medical Scientist Training Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

    Massihullah Hamidi

  2. Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

    Jeffrey S. Johson & Bradley R. Postle

  3. Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK

    Eva Feredoes

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin Madison, 1202 W. Johnson St., Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Bradley R. Postle

Authors
  1. Massihullah Hamidi
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  2. Jeffrey S. Johson
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  3. Eva Feredoes
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  4. Bradley R. Postle
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Correspondence to Bradley R. Postle.

Additional information

Massihullah Hamidi and Jeffrey S. Johson contributed equally to this work.

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Hamidi, M., Johson, J.S., Feredoes, E. et al. Does High-Frequency Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Produce Residual and/or Cumulative Effects Within an Experimental Session?. Brain Topogr 23, 355–367 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-010-0153-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-010-0153-y

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