Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

rTMS improves schizophrenia patients

A new study done by researchers in France suggests that repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) can improve functioning in hallucinating schizophrenia patients. This is one more of a number of positive studies in this area that have been reported on in the past year. rTMS has already been approved by for treatment of depression in some countries, and given the ongoing positive results being reported it seems likely that this treatment will likely be offered to the public in the coming year or two for schizophrenia.

The Study, reported on in Psychiatry Source news, states that Low frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) appears to improve (help people identify as hallucinations) the auditory verbal hallucinations that are common in people who have schizophrenia, .

Psychiatry Source states:

"The team led by Jerome Brunelin, from CH le Vinatier in Bron, France, also found a specific relationship between autonoetic agnosia – a deficit that prevents people being able to distinguish between self-generated thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations.

"Although improvements in auditory verbal hallucinations have been repeatedly reported following rTMS treatment, effects on autonoetic agnosia measured by source monitoring have never been investigated," the researchers note.

They suggest that rTMS, being a more specific treatment for auditory hallucinations, may have a potentially better impact on the cognitive deficit underlying auditory hallucination symptoms than seen in previous studies of source monitoring.

"This study represents a preliminary effort to understand the relationship between a specific psychotic symptoms reduction (eg, auditory hallucinations) and improvement in its underlying cognitive mechanism (eg, autonoetic agnosia as measured by source monitoring performance," the team concludes.

See Full Story: Psychiatry Source - rTMS

Research Article Source: Schizophr Res 2006; 81: 41–45