TMS for treatment of Parkinson’s Disease

Functional MRI(fMRI) has also been used to assess high frequency rTMS delivered to the primary motor cortex [Gonzalez].Use of fMRI enabled showing reductions in bradykinesia following 3 months of rTMS treatment and furthermore, the improvement was correlated with activity in the caudate.  Such tools provide evidence for TMS ability to induce plastic changes to subcortical structures of the brain. Therefore, it is natural that when using fMRI to guideTMS treatments, one could bring the power of these two powerful technologies to provide more benefits to Parkinson’s as measured in gait speed parameters.  This is exactly what Neurotherapeutix has done.

Furthermore, our use of network neuroscience to guide our diagnosis and treatment of PD patients has helped us to understand the abnormal brain connectivity. We have used resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) to show PD as a consequence of the disruptions in several networks.  Research has also shown this model using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) [ Lopes], rsfMRI [Luo] and PET imaging [Brooks]. Many studies on brain network of PD patients have revealed disruptions in the brain networks, which can serve as biomarkers of PD for clinical diagnosis [Amboni] and treatment. At Neurotherapeutix, we offer the use of modular organization of functional brain networks in PD patients as a measure of abnormal functional integration of PD and treat patients based on the network model.