Lasting effects of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS): which mechanisms?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The growing use of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques in general, and of transcranial direct / alternating current stimulation (tDCS / tACS) in particular, has led to identifying physiological effects that outlast the cessation of stimulation (i.e.lasting effects).Reported to last from a few minutes to a few hours, there is still controversy on how electric fields on the order of 1 V/m can induce such lasting effects.Here, we will discuss possible physiologically-plausible mechanisms that could explain, at least in part, some of the reported effects.We argue that evidence exists in the literature to support a mechanism based on alterations of synaptic plasticity due to subtle effects on membre polarization and spike timing following neural entrainment.We discuss how such hypothesis could be experimentally tested with novel approaches such as neuron cultures placed on multi-electrode arrays, and also discuss alternative mechanisms such as alterations of the extracellular medium that would result in increased ephaptic interactions.Finally, we discuss how the question of tDCS / tACS lasting effects is key not only in terms of understanding the involved mechanisms, but most importantly regarding maximizing the duration of therapeutic effects and increase acceptability and compliance by patients.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".