Neurobiology of Repeated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in the Treatment of Anxiety: a Critical Review Stefano Pallantia,B,C and Silvia Bernardia,B
Review 163 Neurobiology of repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation in the treatment of anxiety: a critical review Stefano Pallantia,b,c and Silvia Bernardia,b Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been applied the posttraumatic stress disorder symptom core can be to a growing number of psychiatric disorders as hypothesized. TMS remains an investigational intervention a neurophysiological probe, a primary brain-mapping tool, that has not yet gained approval for the clinical treatment of and a candidate treatment. Although most investigations any anxiety disorder. Clinical sham-controlled trials are have focused on the treatment of major depression, scarce. Many of these trials have supported the idea that increasing attention has been paid to anxiety disorders. TMS has a significant effect, but in some studies, the effect The aim of this study is to summarize published findings is small and short lived. The neurobiological correlates about the application of TMS as a putative treatment for suggest possible efficacy for the treatment of social anxiety disorders. TMS neurophysiological and mapping anxiety that still has to be investigated. Int Clin findings, both clinical and preclinical, have been included Psychopharmacol 24:163–173 c 2009 Wolters Kluwer when relevant. We searched Medline, PsycInfo, and the Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Cochrane Library from 1980 to January 2009 for the terms ‘generalized anxiety disorder’, ‘social anxiety disorder’, International Clinical Psychopharmacology 2009, 24:163–173 ‘social phobia’, ‘panic’, ‘anxiety’, or ‘posttraumatic stress Keywords: anxiety, cortical excitability, panic, posttraumatic stress disorder, disorder’ in combination with ‘TMS’, ‘cortex excitability’, repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation, social anxiety, transcranial ‘rTMS’, ‘motor threshold’, ‘motor evoked potential’, ‘cortical magnetic stimulation silent period’, ‘intracortical inhibition’, ‘neuroimaging’, or ‘intracortical facilitation’.
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