Magnetic stimulation may improve stroke recovery
Posted on: Thursday, 18 August 2005, 22:17 CDT
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The results of a small preliminary trial suggest that a type of magnetic stimulation of the brain --- repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) -- may produce short-term improvements after stroke.
With rTMS, the head is placed close to intermittent magnetic fields. No anesthesia is required and the procedure is performed on an outpatient basis. Patients may complain of headaches during rTMS, depending on the strength of the field used.
Previous trials of rTMS used to treat depression and movement disorders have yielded mixed results, the study investigators note.
In their current study, reported in the medical journal Neurology, Dr. Eman M. Khedr, from Assiut University Hospital in Egypt, and colleagues recruited 52 patients within 5 to 10 days of stroke onset. In addition to standard physical and medical therapies, patients were randomly assigned to 10 daily sessions of rTMS or a fake "sham" treatment.
Stimulation was applied intermittently for 10 minutes over the area of the brain in which the stroke occurred.
When evaluated 10 days after the last rTMS session, 35 percent of those in the rTMS group and 8 percent in the sham group had a good-to-excellent functional outcome. On the same day, 50 percent of the treatment patients and 19 percent of the sham patients exhibited only mild disability.
However, the six patients in the rTMS group and five in the sham group who had massive strokes had no improvement associated with treatment.
Conclusions that can be drawn from this study are limited because of the small number of subjects and short duration of follow-up, Dr. Paolo Maria Rossini, at University Campus Biomedico in Rome, and Dr. Claiborne S. Johnston, from the University of California San Francisco, comment in an accompanying editorial.
While lauding this "new avenue of research," the editorialists suggest that more studies should be conducted with animals before proceeding to human trials.
SOURCE: Neurology, August 9, 2005.
Source: REUTERS
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