(Press-News.org) Fast Facts
People with schizophrenia often suffer from cognitive difficulties.
Transcranial direct current stimulation of the brain is widely considered safe and is being studied as a treatment for depression.
In a Johns Hopkins study of people with schizophrenia, transcranial direct current stimulation led to improvements in short-term memory.
Lightly stimulating the brain with electricity may improve short-term memory in people with schizophrenia, according to a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
The procedure, known as transcranial direct current stimulation, involves placing sponge-covered electrodes on the head and passing a weak electrical current between them. It is widely regarded as safe, and the procedure is being studied as a treatment for depression and Alzheimer's-related memory loss, and to enhance recovery following strokes. David Schretlen, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, reasoned that this type of brain stimulation might ease some of the cognitive difficulties that afflict people with schizophrenia.
'Cognitive impairment is as ubiquitous as hallucinations in schizophrenia, yet medications only treat the hallucinations. So even with medication, affected individuals often remain very disabled,' Schretlen says. His hope is that transcranial direct current stimulation could give people with schizophrenia a shot at leading a more normal life.
To test that possibility, Schretlen and five Johns Hopkins colleagues targeted a brain region called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which plays an important role in short-term or working memory and is abnormal in people with schizophrenia. Interestingly, parents, siblings and children of people with schizophrenia show some of the same abnormalities to a lesser degree.
Schretlen recruited 11 participants: five adults with confirmed schizophrenia and six of their close relatives. Each participant received two 30-minute treatments -- one using a negative electrical charge, which the researchers thought might prove beneficial -- and the other using a positive charge as a control. During and after each treatment, participants completed a battery of cognitive tests. On tests of verbal and visual working memory, participants performed significantly better after receiving a negative charge, and the effects were 'surprisingly strong,' says Schretlen.
Schretlen also tested participants' verbal fluency, or word retrieval, during the treatment. People with schizophrenia often struggle to find the right words, Schretlen explains. Because the prefrontal cortex contains a brain region responsible for word retrieval, Schretlen thought transcranial direct current stimulation might help. To test that theory, he gave participants a minute to list things they could buy in a supermarket. Most people taking the test rattle off items in categories, naming fruits, then vegetables, then dairy products, for example. Schretlen found that while participants did not rattle off more words, they did better at the challenging task of switching between categories after a negatively charged treatment.
The stimulation 'was associated with better performance on working memory and subtle changes in word retrieval,' Schretlen says.
Schretlen is now studying transcranial direct current stimulation in a larger sample of patients using repeated sessions of stimulation, which he hopes will induce lasting benefits.
'What's nice about transcranial direct current stimulation is that it's so benign. There are no bad side effects,' Schretlen says. 'If it enables people with schizophrenia to think more clearly, it would make a huge contribution to the treatment of this devastating illness.'
INFORMATION:
A paper describing the study was co-authored by J. Jason van Steenburgh, Ph.D.; Mark Varvaris, B.A.; Tracy D. Vannorsdall, Ph.D.; Megan A. Andrejczuk, M.S.; and Barry Gordon, M.D., Ph.D. It was published online in Clinical Schizophrenia and Related Psychoses.
This research was funded by the Therapeutic Cognitive Neuroscience Professorship; the Therapeutic Cognitive Neuroscience Fund; the Benjamin and Adith Miller Family Endowment on Aging, Alzheimer's and Autism; and the National Institute on Child and Human Development (Grant No. HD053312). Drs. Schretlen and Vannorsdall are entitled to a share of royalties on sales of a test used in the study. This arrangement is being managed by The Johns Hopkins University in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.
Contacts:
Marin Hedin
mhedin2@jhmi.edu
410-502-9429
Shawna Williams
shawna@jhmi.edu
410-955-8236
Helen Jones
hjones49@jhmi.edu
410-502-9422
Johns Hopkins Medicine
DALLAS, May 27, 2015 -- African Americans at lower socioeconomic levels, particularly women and younger adults, are at greater risk of heart disease and stroke than those in higher socioeconomic positions, according to research in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the No. 1 killer of all Americans, but the burden is greater for African Americans. According to the American Heart Association 2014 Statistical Update, nearly half of all African American adults have some form of CVD, and they are twice as likely as white adults ...
MINNEAPOLIS - New research suggests people with multiple sclerosis (MS) may have double the risk of dying early compared to people without MS, with those younger than 59 at a three times higher risk. The study is published in the May 27, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
"Despite studies that show MS survival may be improving over time, the more than 2.5 million people affected worldwide by this disabling disease still face a risk of dying earlier, specifically those who are diagnosed younger," said study ...
PITTSBURGH, May 27, 2015 - As the U.S. Supreme Court considers the legality of tax subsidies to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), an investigation by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, the RAND Corporation and Express Scripts provides an unprecedented look at prescription data gleaned from over a million initial enrollees.
The analysis is published online as a Web First article by Health Affairs and will also appear in the journal's June issue.
The study found that among people who enrolled in individual marketplaces, ...
It's both the bane of many parents and what has been called a major national vulnerability: the inability of many children to understand mathematics. Understanding that problem and developing strategies to overcome it is the research focus of Nicole McNeil, Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, and the researchers in her lab.
A new paper by McNeil and Emily Fyfe, a former Notre Dame undergraduate who's now a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, examines if the labels educators use to identify patterns ...
KNOXVILLE--Not every encounter between predator and prey results in death. A new study co-authored by a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor suggests that prey emit warning cues that can ultimately lead to both their survival and that of their predators.
The hypothesis addresses a 150-year-old mystery of evolution on how warning signals of animals and plants arise and explains animals' instinctive avoidances of dangerous prey.
The study is published this month in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. It is available online at http://tinyurl.com/njdq5og.
"People ...
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Teenage girls like and feel more similar to women in appearance-focused jobs such as models and actresses, though they find female CEOs and military pilots to be better role models, according to a new study by researchers at Oregon State University.
For the study, 100 girls and 76 boys ages 14 to 18 were shown photographs of model Heidi Klum, actress Jennifer Aniston, CEO Carly Fiorina and military pilot Sarah Deal Burrow. Klum and Aniston represented the appearance-focused careers and Fiorina and Deal Burrow represented the non-appearance focused careers.
Girls ...
Philadelphia - While advances in technology have made multigene testing, or "panel testing," for genetic mutations that increase the risk of breast or other cancers an option, authors of a review published today in the New England Journal of Medicine say larger studies are needed in order to provide reliable risk estimates for counseling these patients. The international consortium of authors, including researchers at the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center, acknowledges that panel testing can make a useful contribution to predicting ...
Boulder, Colo., USA - Salt rock behaves as a fluid and can play a pivotal role in the large-scale, long-term collapse of the world's continental margins. However, the precise way in which this occurs is laced in controversy; nowhere is this controversy more apparent than along the Brazilian continental margin, where the origin of a feature called "the Albian Gap" has generated much heated debate over several decades.
In this new, open-access GSA Bulletin article, Christopher A-L. Jackson and colleagues enter this debate, critiquing the geological and geophysical evidence ...
Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that a tiny single-celled parasite may have a greater-than expected impact on honey bee colonies, which have been undergoing mysterious declines worldwide for the past decade.
In this week's issue of the journal PLOS ONE, (see http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0126330), the scientists report that a microsporidian called Nosema ceranae, which has been known to infect adult Asiatic and European honey bees, can also infect honeybee larvae. They also discovered that honey bee larvae infected with the microsporidian have reduced ...
Scientists at the University of California, San Diego and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have described a new method for detecting liver cancer metastases in mice. The approach uses over-the-counter probiotics genetically programmed to produce signals easily detectable in urine when liver cancer metastases are present. The results of the new study, published in the May 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine, indicate that genetically-programmed probiotics may be useful for detecting liver cancer metastases early-on in the progression of the disease. ...
