May 4, 2010
Maureen Hunter
Strategic Marketing Manager - Elsevier
215-239-3674
BRAIN STIMULATION MAY REDUCE FOOD CRAVINGS IN BULIMIA
Controlling bingeing by stimulating the brain? New research appearing in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, suggests that it might be possible.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS, is a non-invasive technique that enables doctors to selectively stimulate areas of the cerebral cortex. The procedure involves holding a coil that delivers the stimulation against the skull adjacent to brain regions of interest. It is currently an FDA-approved treatment for depression, but this approach may apply to other disorders.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has been implicated in the experience of food craving, an important trigger for bingeing. Frederique Van den Eynde and colleagues used rTMS to target this brain region in people with bulimic eating disorders to evaluate its effect on craving. Some of the subjects received real rTMS treatment, while others received inactive rTMS treatment as a control group.
Dr. Van den Eynde explained their findings: “We found that in the real rTMS group, food craving was reduced after one session of rTMS, as was binge-eating over the following 24 hours. The data suggest that rTMS may have therapeutic potential for treating craving.”
“Now that TMS is an approved treatment for depression, it is likely that we will see a variety of forms of TMS emerge that might be useful for the treatment of other psychiatric conditions. This work also highlights that binge eating is controlled in important ways by higher cortical centers that can be stimulated by TMS,” commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry.
Additional research is necessary to evaluate the longer-term effects of rTMS treatment for bulimic eating disorders.
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Notes to Editors:
The article is “Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Reduces Cue-Induced Food Craving in Bulimic Disorders” by Frederique Van den Eynde, Angelica M. Claudino, Andrew Mogg, Linda Horrell, Daniel Stahl, Wagner Ribeiro, Rudolf Uher, Iain Campbell, and Ulrike Schmidt. The authors are affiliated with Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London, United Kingdom. Claudino and Ribeiro are also with the Department of Psychiatry, Federal University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. The article appears in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 67, Issue 8 (April 15, 2010), published by Elsevier.
The authors’ disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article.
John H. Krystal, M.D. is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and a research psychiatrist at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available at http://journals.elsevierhealth.com/webfiles/images/journals/bps/Biological_Psychiatry_Editorial_Disclosures_08_01_09.pdf.
Full text of the article mentioned above is available upon request. Contact Maureen Hunter at to obtain a copy or to schedule an interview.
About Biological Psychiatry
This international rapid-publication journal is the official journal of the Society of Biological Psychiatry. It covers a broad range of topics in psychiatric neuroscience and therapeutics. Both basic and clinical contributions are encouraged from all disciplines and research areas relevant to the pathophysiology and treatment of major neuropsychiatric disorders. Full-length and Brief Reports of novel results, Commentaries, Case Studies of unusual significance, and Correspondence and Comments judged to be of high impact to the field are published, particularly those addressing genetic and environmental risk factors, neural circuitry and neurochemistry, and important new therapeutic approaches. Concise Reviews and Editorials that focus on topics of current research and interest are also published rapidly.
Biological Psychiatry (www.sobp.org/journal) is ranked 4th out of the 101 Psychiatry titles and 14th out of 219 Neurosciences titles on the 2008 ISI Journal Citations Reports® published by Thomson Scientific.
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