Duh! of the week......
The growing trend of “do-it-yourself” transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) poses hidden risks to healthy members of the public who seek to use the technique for cognitive enhancement. Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, along with several members of the (cognitive) neuroscience research community warn about such risks involved in home use of tDCS, the application of electrical current to the brain. Their Open Letter will appear in the July 7th issue of Annals of Neurology.
First, it is not yet known whether stimulation extends beyond the specific brain regions targeted. These indirect effects may alter unintended brain functions. “We don’t know how the stimulation of one brain region affects the surrounding, unstimulated regions,” said co-author Roy Hamilton, MD, MS, an assistant professor of Neurology and director of the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation at Penn. “Stimulating one region could improve one’s ability to perform one task but hurt the ability to perform another.”
In addition, what a person is doing during tDCS – reading a book, watching TV, sleeping – can change its effects. Which activity is best to achieve a certain change in brain function is not yet known.
Wurzman, Hamilton and colleagues go on to say that they have never performed tDCS at the frequency levels some home users experiment with, such as stimulating daily for months or longer. “We know that stimulation from a few sessions can be quite lasting, but we do not yet know the possible risks of a larger cumulative dose over several years or a lifetime,” they wrote.