Changes in cerebral glucose metabolism after 3 weeks of noninvasive electrical stimulation of mild cognitive impairment patients

Creators: Yun, Kyongsik; Song, In-Uk; Chung, Yong-An

Abstract

Background: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a syndrome that disrupts an individual's cognitive function but preserves activities of daily living. MCI is thought to be a prodromal stage of dementia, which disrupts patients' daily lives and causes severe cognitive dysfunction. Although extensive clinical trials have attempted to slow or stop the MCI to dementia conversion, the results have been largely unsuccessful. The purpose of this study was to determine whether noninvasive electrical stimulation of MCI changes glucose metabolism. Methods: Sixteen MCI patients participated in this study. We used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) (2 mA/day, three times per week for 3 weeks) and assessed positron emission tomography (18 F-FDG) before and after 3 weeks of stimulation. Results: We showed that regular and relatively long-term use of tDCS significantly increased regional cerebral metabolism in MCI patients. Furthermore, subjective memory satisfaction and improvement of the memory strategies of participants were observed only in the real tDCS group after 3 weeks of stimulation. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that neurophysiological intervention of MCI could improve glucose metabolism and transient memory function in MCI patients.

Additional Information

© The Author(s). 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Received: 5 July 2016; Accepted: 24 October 2016; Published: 1 December 2016. Acknowledgements: Not applicable. Funding: This research was supported by the Brain Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (2015M3C7A1064832). Availability of data and materials: All data can be used with the permission of the corresponding authors. Authors' contributions: KY was responsible for the study concept and design, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation, and manuscript preparation. I-US was responsible for the study concept and design, critical revision of the manuscript, and study supervision. Y-AC was responsible for the study concept and design, critical revision of the manuscript, and study supervision. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Consent for publication: Not applicable. Ethical approval and consent to participate: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Research Committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. All participants provided written informed consent after receiving a detailed explanation of the experimental procedures. The Institutional Review Board of the Catholic University of Korea approved all experimental procedures for this study.

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