Journal article
Essential tremor amplitude modulation by median nerve stimulation
- Abstract:
- Essential tremor is a common neurological disorder, characterised by involuntary shaking of a limb. Patients are usually treated using medications which have limited effects on tremor and may cause side-effects. Surgical therapies are effective in reducing essential tremor, however, the invasive nature of these therapies together with the high cost, greatly limit the number of patients benefiting from them. Non-invasive therapies have gained increasing traction to meet this clinical need. Here, we test a non-invasive and closed-loop electrical stimulation paradigm which tracks peripheral tremor and targets thalamic afferents to modulate the central oscillators underlying tremor. To this end, 9 patients had electrical stimulation delivered to the median nerve locked to different phases of tremor. Peripheral stimulation induced a subtle but significant modulation in five out of nine patients—this modulation consisted mainly of amplification rather than suppression of tremor amplitude. Modulatory effects of stimulation were more pronounced when patient’s tremor was spontaneously weaker at stimulation onset, when significant modulation became more frequent amongst subjects. This data suggests that for selected individuals, a more sophisticated control policy entailing an online estimate of both tremor phase and amplitude, should be considered in further explorations of the treatment potential of tremor phase-locked peripheral stimulation.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 1.6MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-021-96660-6
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 17720
- Publication date:
- 2021-09-06
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-08-05
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2045-2322
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1194019
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1194019
- Deposit date:
-
2021-09-10
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Reis et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- ©2021 The Author(s). Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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