Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article strikes me as overly optimistic, but presents interesting possibilities for depression and anxiety neurofeedback, TMS, and other brain stimulation treatments of the future.
Brain stimulation seems like a fairly promising technology for things like traumatic brain injury, mental illness, and sleep issues. These are pretty new ideas, especially to the public eye, which means there hasn't been a ton by way of large scale testing. This is also due to the fact that the medical industry tends to throw pills at things first and shrug helplessly if that doesn't work.
Because we don't have that large scale testing, and because peoples' brains differ so much, brain stimulation is a "we'll try this and maybe it'll help!" situation. Which, it can and has. But we don't really know why something helps or doesn't, for the most part. And like any therapy, doing it incorrectly can hurt as well as heal.
When I began receiving LENS (Low Energy Neurofeedback System) from my doctor, she was very careful and methodical about it. We had no map, but she's an experienced practitioner. We tried various types of signal styles, and varying numbers of modifications. In the end, we settled on a particular style, and 1-2 modifications every two weeks. We also skip over the spots that would modify my motor strip, because the last time we tried that it put me into road rage. Fortunately, the modifications can be countered via the same process they're induced.
Even with my doctor's expertise, it was still a process to find what worked. These researchers, it seems, are aiming to remove the guesswork from brain stimulation. They've developed the keys to making a computer able to predict what changes will occur in the brain when a particular type of stimulation is applied.
Basically, they're trying to make it so a doctor could scan a patient's brain, then take that scan, give it to the computer, and have the computer virtually simulate what would happen if various brain stimulation techniques were applied. The doctor can then return to the patient and administer the one that's most likely to work best.
At present, it looks like they're focused on only one kind of brain stimulation, rather than the broad spectrum that includes TMS, LENS, and active neurofeedback. Still, it's a step in the right direction. Someday, I hope to live in a world where the medication roulette game is only played when other, better options have failed. If more of this kind of research is funded and published, that day may not be that far in the future.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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