Findings, limitations and new directions in tACS studies in schizophrenia research: A scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Schizophrenia (SZ) is a severe neurodevelopmental spectrum disorder with significant consequences for the individual who is diagnosed and their family, resulting in notable system-level costs associated with the current methods of treatment. With a complex etiology, this syndrome continues to evade our thorough understanding and invites cautious analysis into how the newest research findings may translate into meaningful interventions. Recent explorations of non-invasive interventions in psychiatry suggest that transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is a safe and potentially promising add-on to the current SZ treatment. METHODS: We performed a systematic literature search for tACS studies on SZ in three databases - Embase, Pubmed and Medline. The search yielded 29 titles and abstracts, of which 8 met the criteria for inclusion: experimental use of tACS on patients with SZ. RESULTS: We found 8 publications where findings from tACS were applied on participants with SZ. The most common frequencies used were theta (4.5 Hertz [Hz] and 6 Hz), alpha (10 Hz) and gamma (40 Hz). The main findings resulting from tACS delivery were: (1) decrease in auditory hallucinations; (2) decrease in negative symptoms; (3) cognitive improvement; and, (4) no change. CONCLUSIONS: This scoping review provides a highlight of current protocols used in tACS studies on SZ, their main findings and limitations, and points towards a direction for new approaches. The wide variety of objectives, protocols and assessments used by researchers demonstrates the diversified nature of research currently used in this field, suggesting the need for a more thorough exploration as results continue to emerge.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".