Electrical stimulation of the brain may help people who stutter

When Guillermo Mejias was 7 years old, his parents sent him out to buy bread during a family holiday in southern Spain. Mejias still remembers his growing anxiety as he walked to the bakery, repeating what he would say over and over in his head. But when the moment arrived, he was unable to produce a single word. He recalls returning empty-handed, ashamed, and wondering what to tell his parents. “I was so tense that I had been inadvertently biting my cheeks and tongue and my mouth was bleeding,” he says. Mejias still stutters, but today, as a brain researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, he investigates ways to treat the problem. He is part of a growing group of researchers who have pinned their hopes on noninvasive brain stimulation, a set of techniques that applies small electric currents to specific brain regions. A few years ago, Mejias tried such a technique on himself in a one-off experiment that temporarily reduced the frequency of his stuttering, he says. A few randomized trials, including one published this month in the Journal of Fluency Disorders , also suggest brain stimulation can benefit people who stutter. “I think brain stimulation is the future,” Mejias says. Not everyone agrees. No study has yet reported effects lasting months after treatment, let alone years. And anecdotal evidence suggests trials of stuttering treatments are susceptible to the placebo effect, meaning that, just from being in the trial, participants...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research