Brain stimulation therapies involve activating or inhibiting the brain directly with electricity. It could be used to treat cognitive deficits frequently associated with schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder characterised by abnormal social behavior. This can make it difficult for affected people to plan, focus, pay attention and remember information.
Problems in short-term memory and decision making, which are often severely impaired in people with schizophrenia can be corrected by brain stimulation.
Researchers used neuromodulation - transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) - to check if they could correct some of these cognitive deficit in people with schizophrenia.
The researchers applied tDCS with tasks which specifically tapped into 'working memory' and ' executive functioning ': the principle was that 'training' the brain in regions that are typically poorly performing in schizophrenia would be enhanced by the brain stimulation technique.
An improvement in cognitive performance was discovered in those who had tDCS brain stimulation after 24 hours. This shows that changes in the
brain cells induced by neuromodulation may take some time to occur.
The researchers also ran brain imaging analyses to determine what was happening in the brain as these changes occurred. They discovered that tDCS was linked with changes in brain activity in regions associated with working memory and cerebellum.
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