Background:Post-stroke fatigue seriously affects the quality of life for stroke patients. There is no effective treatment at present. transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation which may have therapeutic effect on post-stroke fatigue. This study will explore about this.Method:A total of 60 patients with post-stroke fatigue were randomly divided into the control group and the treatment group with 30 patients each by minimization randomization. Both groups received basic treatment and conventional rehabilitation. In the treatment group, patients were treated with active tDCS, while in the control group, sham tDCS. Both active and sham tDCS were administered 6 times a week for 4 weeks. Before and after the trial, the Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS), Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA) and Modified Barthel Index (MBI) were evaluated and analyzed. And comparisons were made among groups. And there were an 8-week follow-up after the intervention.Result:Before the intervention, there were no significant differences in baseline data and assessment scores between the groups (P > 0.05). After 4 weeks of intervention, FSS scores in the treatment group were significantly lower than those in the control group (P = 0.012), and FMA and BMI scores were significantly higher than those in the control group (P < 0.05). There was no significant change in FSS scores after 8 months of follow-up (P > 0.05).Discussion:TDCS is a safe treatment that can effectively reduce the degree of fatigue after stroke, improve the motor function and daily activity ability of patients after stroke, and the efficacy is better than only routine rehabilitation training.Trial registration number:Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, ChiCTR2000031120. Registered on March 22, 2020.

Background Disorders of consciousness (DOC) after traumatic brain injury (TBI) raise the mortality of patients, restrict the rehabilitation of patients with TBI, and increase the physical and economic burden that TBI imposes on patients and their families. Thus, treatment to promote early awakening in DOC after TBI is of vital importance. Various treatments have been reported, but there is no advanced evidence base to support them. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has shown great potential in promoting neuroelectrochemical effects. This protocol is for a double-blind, randomized, controlled, clinical trial aiming to research the effects and safety of conventional rehabilitation combined with tDCS therapy in patients with DOC after TBI. Methods/design Eighty patients with DOC after TBI will be randomized into one of two groups receiving conventional rehabilitation combined with sham tDCS or conventional rehabilitation combined with active tDCS. The intervention period in each of the two groups will last 4 weeks (20 min per day, 6 days per week). Primary outcomes (Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS)) will be measured at baseline and the end of every week from the first to the fourth week. Secondary outcomes will be measured at baseline and the end of the fourth week. Adverse events and untoward effects will be measured during each treatment. Discussion Patients with central nervous system lesions have received tDCS as a painless, non-invasive, easily applied and effective therapy for several decades, and there has been some evidence in recent years showing partial improvement on the level of consciousness of partial patients with DOC. However, reports mainly focus on the patients in a minimally conscious state (MCS), and there is a lack of large-sample clinical trials. This protocol presents an objective design for a randomized controlled trial that aims to study the effectiveness of conventional rehabilitation combined with tDCS therapy for DOC after TBI, to evaluate its safety, and to explore effective and economical therapeutic methods. Trial registration Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, ChiCTR1800014808. Registered on 7 February 2018.

Introduction Post-stroke fatigue (PSF) is an abnormal, persistent, and unexplained physical and psychological tiredness in patients after stroke. It is a common symptom of stroke patients with poor quality of life and bleak prognosis, and the incidence rate is up to 39% to 72%. It has been widely reported that medicine treatments achieved a lot of progress, there still needs to develop more powerful new strategies to more powerful effect. The transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) shows great potential for the treatment of PSF. This study proposes to apply a double-blind randomized controlled clinical trial to explore the effect and safety of tDCS combined with routine rehabilitation for PSF. Methods and analysis One hundred patients with PSF will be randomly divided into two groups. One of the groups will receive conventional rehabilitation therapy and active tDCS, whereas another group will receive conventional rehabilitation treatment and sham tDCS. Both groups will receive the intervention for 4 weeks, during which time they will undergo either active or sham tDCS 20 min a day, 6 days a week. Primary outcome: Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS) will be measured at baseline every weekend during the intervention period. Secondary results: Fatigue Impact Scale (FIS), Functional Assessment Chronic Illness Therapy (Fatigue) (FACIT-F), and Specialized Quality of Life Scale in Stroke (SS-QOL) will be measured at baseline and at the end of the intervention time of 4 weeks. Throughout the study, adverse events and adverse reactions will be measured during every treatment. The research study “Effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on patients with post-stroke fatigue” has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University: Clinical Medicine Ethics Review [2015]043 in Nov 2015. Discussion This study will provide insight into the efficacy of transcranial direct-current stimulation for post-stroke fatigue. This is a double-blind randomized controlled trial whose aim is to assess the effects of tDCS on PSF. This study can provide more information about the treatment of PSF. This study has a period of follow-up, which allows for greater accuracy. It is a single-center trial, and this may be a limitation. The other limitation of this study is the relatively small number of participants; thus, the influence of chance on experimental results cannot be completely ruled out. Trial registration Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR2000031120. Registered on March 22, 2020. This protocol version number is V1.1.

ObjectiveThis study aimed to evaluate the current research hotspots and development tendency of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) in the field of neurobiology from a bibliometric perspective by providing visualized information to scientists and clinicians.Materials and methodsPublications related to tDCS published between 2000 and 2022 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) on May 5, 2022. Bibliometric features including the number of publications and citations, citation frequency, H-index, journal impact factors, and journal citation reports were summarized using Microsoft Office Excel. Co-authorship, citation, co-citation, and co-occurrence analyses among countries, institutions, authors, co-authors, journals, publications, references, and keywords were analyzed and visualized using CiteSpace (version 6.1.R3).ResultsA total of 4,756 publications on tDCS fulfilled the criteria we designed and then were extracted from the WOSCC. The United States (1,190 publications, 25.02%) and Harvard University (185 publications, 3.89%) were the leading contributors among all the countries and institutions, respectively. NITSCHE MA and FREGNI F, two key researchers, have made great achievements in tDCS. Brain Stimulation (306 publications) had the highest number of publications relevant to tDCS and the highest number of citations (4,042 times). In terms of potential hotspots, we observed through reference co-citation analysis timeline viewer related to tDCS that “depression”#0, “Sensorimotor network”#10, “working memory”#11, and “Transcranial magnetic stimulation”#9 might be the future research hotspots, while keywords with the strong burst and still ongoing were “intensity” (2018–2022), “impairment” (2020–2022), “efficacy” (2020–2022), and “guideline” (2020–2022).ConclusionThis was the first-ever study of peer-reviewed publications relative to tDCS using several scientometric and visual analytic methods to quantitatively and qualitatively reveal the current research status and trends in the field of tDCS. Through the bibliometric method, we gained an in-depth understanding of the current research status and development trend on tDCS. Our research and analysis results might provide some practical sources for academic scholars and clinicians.