Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation: How Electricity Helps Release Opiate-Like Painkiller
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - 15:10
in Health & Medicine
A radiotracer has shown that researchers who used electricity on certain regions in the brain of a patient with chronic, severe facial pain led to release of an opiate-like substance that's considered one of the body's most powerful painkillers. In their current study, researcher intravenously administered a radiotracer that reached important brain areas in a patient with trigeminal neuropathic pain (TNP), a type of chronic, severe facial pain. They applied the electrodes and electrically stimulated the skull right above the motor cortex of the patient for 20 minutes during a PET scan (positron emission tomography). The stimulation is called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). read more