Journal
BRAIN STIMULATION
Volume 11, Issue 4, Pages 727-733Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.brs.2018.03.006
Keywords
Deep brain stimulation; Transcranial direct current stimulation; Body resistance; Dose-dependence; Voltage-current relationship
Categories
Funding
- National Center of Neuromodulation for Rehabilitation [P2CHD086844]
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health [P20GM109040]
- SC-CoAST/NIH StrokeNet [U10NS086490]
- American Heart Association [15SFDRN24480016, 14SDG1829003]
- National Institute of Health [K23NS091391]
- Rehabilitation Research and Development Service [I01RX001935]
- National Institute of Mental Health [R01MH111896]
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke [R01NS101362]
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Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a promising brain modulation technique for several disease conditions. With this technique, some portion of the current penetrates through the scalp to the cortex and modulates cortical excitability, but a recent human cadaver study questions the amount. This insufficient intracerebral penetration of currents may partially explain the inconsistent and mixed results in tDCS studies to date. Experimental validation of a transcranial alternating current stimulation-generated electric field (EF) in vivo has been performed on the cortical (using electrocorticography, ECoG, electrodes), subcortical (using stereo electroencephalography, SEEG, electrodes) and deeper thalamic/subthalamic levels (using DBS electrodes). However, tDCS-generated EF measurements have never been attempted. Objective: We aimed to demonstrate that tDCS generates biologically relevant EF as deep as the subthalamic level in vivo. Methods: Patients with movement disorders who have implanted deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes serve as a natural experimental model for thalamic/subthalamic recordings of tDCS-generated EF. We measured voltage changes from DBS electrodes and body resistance from tDCS electrodes in three subjects while applying direct current to the scalp at 2 mA and 4 mA over two tDCS montages. Results: Voltage changes at the level of deep nuclei changed proportionally with the level of applied current and varied with different tDCS montages. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that scalp-applied tDCS generates biologically relevant EF. Incorporation of these experimental results may improve finite element analysis (FEA)-based models. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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