At a glance
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Alcoholism Treatment by Cognitive Neuromodulation Produced by Repeated Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Over the Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex
In Brief
A Phase 2 clinical trial evaluating transcranial Direct Current Stimulation for Alcohol Dependence and 2 related conditions. Completed, enrolled 33 participants across 2 sites.
Detailed Summary
Alcohol dependency is the most frequent addiction leading to a massive burden of both, patients health, and economy. Present therapeutic concepts suffer from limited efficacy, and thus new innovative therapies are needed. Neuroscientific studies have shown that prefrontal function in alcohol-dependent patients is impaired, leading to cognitive disturbances, and continuation of dependent behaviour. The results of pilot studies demonstrate that activation of prefrontal cortices via non-invasive brain stimulation improves cognitive performance in healthy subjects, and diminishes dependency-related behaviour in patients. The investigators aim to develop a stimulation protocol suited to induce a clinically relevant improvement of prefrontal functions in patients suffering from alcohol dependency. Therefore, the investigators will develop stimulation protocols which are able to modulate prefrontal activation for a much longer time course than those currently available, and will explore if the induced physiological alterations translate to respective cognitive improvements and reduction of addictive behaviour.
Study Details
Timeline
Interventions
transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS, 5 x 7 cm2, 1 mA, during 10 min) will be applied over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex once a week for 5 consecutive weeks.