Intermittent theta burst stimulation for negative symptoms in schizophrenia patients with moderate to severe cognitive impairment: A randomized controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: This study aims to assess the therapeutic effects of intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) targeting the bilateral dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) on negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia, utilizing functional near-infrared spectroscopy for evaluation. METHODS: Thirty-five schizophrenia patients with negative symptoms and moderate to severe cognitive impairment were randomly assigned to a treatment group (n = 18) or a control group (n = 17). The treatment group received iTBS via bilateral DMPFC. Negative symptoms, cognitive function, emotional state, and social function were assessed using Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS), Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia (CDSS), and Social Dysfunction Screening Questionnaire (SDSS) scales at pretreatment, posttreatment, and follow-up at 4, 8, and 12 weeks. Brain activation in regions of interest (ROIs) was evaluated through verbal fluency tasks. RESULTS: Prior to treatment there was no significant difference in the two groups. After 20 iTBS sessions, a significant difference was observed in SANS total score, its related subscales, PANSS total score, and PANSS-negative symptoms (all P < 0.05). The group-by-time interaction showed statistical significance, indicating improvements in negative symptoms and related dimensions over time, with therapeutic effects persisting for at least 8 weeks posttreatment. Prior to treatment, there were no significant differences in activation across all ROIs between the two groups. Posttreatment, the activation of right inferior frontal gyrus (t = 2.19, P = 0.036) and right frontal eye field (t = 2.14, P = 0.04) in the treatment group was significantly higher than in the control group. CONCLUSIONS: iTBS stimulation of bilateral DMPFC demonstrates therapeutic effects in improving negative symptoms in schizophrenia patients, and this treatment approach has the potential to enhance activation within the prefrontal cortex.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".