Transcranial direct current stimulation for the treatment of primary progressive aphasia: An open-label pilot study

Abstract

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative condition characterized by gradual deterioration of language function. We investigated whether two weeks of daily transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) treatment would improve language abilities in six people with a non-fluent form of PPA. tDCS was applied in an unblinded trial at an intensity of 1.5 mA for 20 min/day over 10 days. At the time of stimulation, patients were engaged in narrating one of several children’s wordless picture stories. A battery of neuropsychological assessments was administered four times: at baseline, immediately following the 2-week stimulation period, and then 6-weeks and 12-weeks following the end of stimulation. We observed improvement in linguistic performance in the domains of speech production and grammatical comprehension. Our encouraging results indicate that larger, sham-controlled studies of tDCS as a potential intervention for PPA are warranted.

Electrical brain stimulation in different variants of primary progressive aphasia: A randomized clinical trial

“…Although studies [13,[16][17][18][19][20][21] provide proof-of-concept for the efficacy of tDCS in PPA, these small studies do not yet provide sufficient evidence for sustainability of gains and generalization to untreated items. One difficulty in studying tDCS efficacy in PPA is its phenotypic diversity.…”

Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation in Dementia: A Complex Network Story

“…To date, all NIBS studies were carried out using tDCS and generally reported language enhancement. While there is some variability among studies in the target region, the majority stimulated areas involved in language, such as the left perisylvian cortex [102, 104], left anterior temporal pole [105], left frontotemporal cortex [101], but also areas within the dorsal frontal cortex (left DLPFC and IFG) [99, 100, 106]. Interestingly, 7 of the 8 studies were designed as multiple-session paradigm [99-104, 106] and 4 of them combined a cognitive training with the stimulation protocol [100, 102, 104, 106].…”

Enhancing theory of mind in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia with transcranial direct current stimulation

“…They found that tDCS stimulation facilitated lexical retrieval processes in these patients. A general improvement in linguistic performance in the domains of speech production and grammatical comprehension was found by Gervits et al (2016) after two weeks of daily tDCS. Anodal tDCS stimulation of the left frontotemporal region (with the cathode over the left occipitoparietal region) led to significant improvements on a variety of linguistic measures that were sustained for at least 3 months following tDCS.…”

“…The results of the present study revealed that mild bvFTD is characterized by an impairment in the comprehension of private and communicative intentions compared with HC, with a disproportional impairment in the comprehension of communicative intentions. Very few studies have applied tDCS to patients with FTD, and almost all have mainly focused on the treatment of language deficits in patients with primary progressive aphasia in clinical settings (Cotelli et al, 2016;Cotelli et al, 2014;Gervits et al, 2016;Roncero et al, 2017). An improvement in naming ability was found by Cotelli et al (2014) after applying anodal tDCS to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.…”

“…Application of tDCS (anode over the left frontal cortex) has already been shown to improve language deficits in patients with FTD (Cotelli et al, 2016;Cotelli et al, 2014;Gervits et al, 2016), but to the best of our knowledge, no study has investigated the capacity of tDCS to ameliorate ToM performance in these patients.…”