Day 22: Stumbling upon Interesting Correlations

Taken from article.

Last night, while stumbling upon different science-related web pages through StumbleUpon, I found an article related to neuroscience! Tada! A Little Juice to the Brain Eases Depression. As I have discussed in a previous article, TMS is being used to treat depression and other mood disorders. This recently-published article talks not of TMS, but of transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS. What a familiar acronym! Where have I seen this before? Why, in one of my previous blog posts: "Day 12: Defense against the Dark rTMS." In my blog post, I read about how tDCS is used to negate the negative effects of rTMS.

In the article that I "stumbled upon," the experiment compared the affects of antidepressants vs. tDCS and found that tDCS was significantly better at treating depression than antidepressants. But the two together was found to have worked the fastest in treatment and was said to have had significant improvement by week 2.

The article I'm reading!

So now, I'm reading an article for Journal Club even though I will be absent Friday to visit the venue for Prom and to go to church for Good Friday! Anyway, the article is titled "Differential Modulation of Motor Cortical Plasticity and Excitability in Early and Late Phases of Human Motor Learning." I'll discuss more about it once I finish reading it.

For clarification: If you were wondering why the number of "Day"s is so small even though I've been at this for almost 2 months, the Day number is actually a day I'm in the lab. So, I've been in the lab for 22 individual days. I've been consistent, arriving here at ASU 3 days a week at 8am and starting work at 9.

References:

1. Phend, C. "A Little Juice to the Brain Eases Depression." MedPage Today. 26 Feb 2013. http://www.medpagetoday.com/psychiatry/depression/37226?rXFb&xid=su_&hr=su&utm_source=stumbleupon&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=psyc&rQZb/ (accessed March 25, 2010)