Trans-Cranial Direct Current Stimulation
radiolab.org
radiolab.org
Radiolab used to be great in that almost all the content was about uncovering the awesome science behind a topic. But now they just do mostly "story" or "experience" shows. I used to highly recommend it to my non-science friends as a way to learn about the science behind a topic, but haven't in a while.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3525744
If you take the third at face value, then the poster is edging toward being a genius, but at the cost of being a little more neurotic. Hardly "alarming".
On the other hand, if it is "broke", the long-term effects of tDCS are about as well-studied as the long-term effects of many of the psychoactive substances (legal and otherwise) that we regularly take. No one knows, e.g., what happens to brains 50 years after 5 years of chronically administering SSRIs. Nor do we really know how to characterize "the long-term effects" of nicotine intake (and it's not at all clear that the "long-term effects" of anything that changes one's brain -- apart from in obvious ways e.g. by shrinking it -- is even something that it would make sense to try to characterize).
In general, when it comes to psychoactive anything (and you might even include words, music, prolonged withdrawal from society, and sexy walking in this list) we don't have much more than a few interesting results here and there. When it comes to brains/minds/persons, we really don't know.
What we can surmise is that those things that mammalian brains have not been exposed to (LSD, tDCS, fluoxetine) are likely to have less predictable effects than things in the environment that are phylogenetically familiar (sleep, exercise, prolonged concentration, temporally extended effort, etc.).
In other words, if things are going poorly for you, try the boring approaches first. If those approaches don't work, though, there aren't really any compelling reasons to avoid techniques that are less familiar to your biology.
I would take tDCS over smoking or drinking, any day of the week.
Or even extreme sports.
It's socially acceptable to do some activities which are known to be deadly, but god forbid trying the unknown! That's a total faux pas. What BS. Where's the cost/benefit analysis. Yes: drinking, smoking, and sports can yield utility (fun), but people increasing their IQ or any other vector of intelligence could have a profound impact on society.
I'm in agreement with the rest of your post.
Edit: changed italics from HTML to Markdown
It's "tDCS". You've mixed up the letters in the acronym, and incorrectly capitalized the first letter.
It's thought that it works via the depolarization of the resting membrane potential.
But please see this post by Science-Based Medicine: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/
fixed link: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/brain-stimulation-for-th...
In trials they do shams by turning on the device for only a short period of time. That way there's still a tingle (from the pads) at the start of procedure.
I assume there's a few factors driving growth in this area, what are they? Maybe it's just literally cheaper access to powerful imaging devices?
tDCS is still an emerging tech, and I think not a lot of people have figured out how to do it. Transcranial magnetic stim has been around a lot longer. I don't think people really know the best way to do that either, but there's more experimental data showing that if you do it via certain methods/paradigms, you get a measurable experimental effect of some sort (usually a muscle jerk measured in the arm, or maybe performance on some standardized cognitive/motor skills test, etc).
The problem is that no one is exactly sure what it does. Most groups do not have an IRB to study this in tissue - getting animal IACUC approval is hard, and in humans, without a good medical reason to go through the cranium, forget about it... (i.e. most of the neurophysiology data we know today, aside from in animals, is from opportunities to record data in surgeries for epilepsy or DBS surgery of Parkinson's disease).
So for lack of a better term, the holy mantra of "neuroplasticity" is involved for a hand-wavy explanation of effect...
Caumo, W. (2012). Neurobiological effects of transcranial direct current stimulation: a review, 1–11. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2012.00110/abstract
Berlim, M. T., Van den Eynde, F., & Daskalakis, Z. J. (2012). Clinical utility of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) for treating major depression: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, double-blind and sham-controlled trials. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 1–7. doi:10.1016/j.jpsychires.2012.09.025
Marlow, N. M., Bonilha, H. S., & Short, E. B. (2012). Efficacy of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation for Treating Fibromyalgia Syndrome: A Systematic Review. Pain Practice, no–no. doi:10.1111/j.1533-2500.2012.00562.x
Madhavan, S. (2012). Enhancing motor skill learning with transcranial direct current stimulation – a concise review with applications to stroke, 1–9. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2012.00066/abstract
Oh come on.
For example, here's a clip of a safety study from The Journal of Pain:
(314) Safety of the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): evaluation of 815 tDCS sessions in 100 chronic- pain patients H Knotkova, A Nafissi, Z Leuschner, D Das, I Dhokal, and R Cruciani; Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, NY
There is a growing body of evidence that tDCS can alleviate pain in patients with various pain syndromes, suggesting clinical potential of tDCS in pain man- agement. The purpose of this retrospective study was to evaluate safety and tolerability of tDCS in patients who underwent tDCS treatment at the Institute for Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation, Department of Pain Medicine and Palliative Care, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, between November 2008 and Sep- tember 2010. TDCS was delivered with Phoressor II 850 PM in five 20-min ses- sions on 5 consecutive days, at 2 mA, applying either anodal (excitatory) tDCS over the motor cortex or cathodal (inhibitory) tDCS over the somatosen- sory cortex, using 2 saline-soaked electrodes of 36cm2. One hundred patients with various chronic pain syndromes received 815 tDCS sessions (639 anodal and 176 cathodal) delivered as 172 five-day treatment blocks (131 anodal, 35 cathodal; 80 patients received only anodal treatment blocks, 14 patients only cathodal blocks, 6 received both). Neither anodal nor cathodal tDCS resulted in any serious adverse events (AEs). The most frequently reported non-serious AEs were: transient Tingling/Burning/Itching under the electrode during the stimulation in 27 (4.2%) of anodal and 14 (7.9%) of cathodal sessions; transient Headache after the stimulation: 16 (2.5%) anodal, 2 (1.1%) cathodal); Fatigue: 7 (1.1%) anodal, 0 cathodal; Nausea: 4 (0.6%) anodal, 1 (0.6%) cathodal; Dis- comfort: 3 (0.5%) anodal, 1 (0.6%) cathodal; Dizziness: 1 (0.2%) anodal, 4 (2.3%) cathodal; Insomnia: in 3 (0.5%) of anodal and 1 (0.6%) of cathodal ses- sions. The adherence to the tDCS treatment was very good: patients completed 92% (111 of 121) of anodal five-day treatment blocks and 100% (35 of 35) of cathodal blocks, indicating high acceptability of tDCS procedure. In conclusion, the findings contribute to the evidence on tDCS safety, supporting clinical potential of tDCS in chronic pain management.