Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging
Archival ReportReduction in Left Frontal Alpha Oscillations by Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation in Major Depressive Disorder Is Context Dependent in a Randomized Clinical Trial
Section snippets
Methods and Materials
The experiment was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Participants recruited from the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill community provided written consent before participation. The experiment was conducted in the Carolina Center for Neurostimulation from September 2018 to August 2019. The experimental design consisted of two groups, those in an MDE and euthymic control participants, in which each participant received either tACS or an active
Electrical Stimulation Modulates Left Frontal Alpha Power in MDD
Participants were successfully blinded to the stimulation (n = 80, 2 participants did not answer, χ21,80 = 0.2631, p = .608). Of the 42 participants who received verum stimulation, 33 believed that they received verum stimulation. However, of the 40 participants who received sham stimulation, 28 believed that they received verum stimulation (2 chose not to answer). Thus, participants, irrespective of stimulation type, were biased toward believing they received verum, and their accuracy was
Discussion
Patients in an MDE were recruited to receive 40 minutes of tACS in the IAF designed to reduce left frontal alpha oscillations. Electrophysiology was recorded before and after stimulation. In agreement with our previous clinical trial that applied 5 consecutive days of tACS in patients with depression (11), we found a selective decrease in left frontal IAF power for verum versus sham stimulation. The effect was driven by an increase in left frontal IAF power for sham stimulation that was negated
Acknowledgments and Disclosures
This study was supported in part by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health (Grant Nos. R01MH101547 and R01MH111889 [to FF]) and the postdoctoral training program (JR) in reproductive mood disorders (Grant No. T32MH09331502 [to DRR]).
We thank Alana K. Atkins and Trevor McPherson for help with data collection. We also thank Trevor McPherson for assistance with coding the adjusted log-distribution and experimental presentation scripts and Regina Lapate for
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