Your Mood Could Improve With the Help of a Brain Ultrasound
In 2002 a UCLA group led by Alexander Bystritsky noticed beneficial side effects in psychiatric patients whose brains were imaged by TUS. A team led by Virginia Tech’s W. Jamie Tyler has shown TUS-induced behavioral and electrophysiological changes in animals.
A Harvard group led by S-S Yoo has used focused ultrasound aimed at mouse m otor cortex to wag the mouse’s tail. But clinical trials of TUS aimed at human mental states have been lacking.
Now, a group from the Departments of Anesthesiology and Radiology at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona has investigated TUS for modulating mental states in a pilot study in human volunteers suffering from chronic pain.
A clinical ultrasound imaging device (General Electric LOGIQe) was used, with the ultrasound probe applied at the scalp overlying the brain’s temporal and frontal cortex (visible on the imaging screen). In random order, each subject received two 15 second exposures: sham/placebo, and 8 megahertz ultrasound (undetectable to subjects).
Following exposure, subjects reported (by visual analog scales) significant improvement in mood both 10 minutes and 40 minutes after TUS, but not after sham/placebo.
In a follow-up study (led by University of Arizona psychologists Jay Sanguineti and John JB Allen) preliminary results suggest 2 megahertz TUS (which traverses skull more readily) may be more effective in mood enhancement than 8 megahertz TUS.
The mechanism by which TUS can affect mental states is unknown (as is the mechanism by which the brain produces mental states). Tyler proposed TUS acts by vibrational stretching of neuronal membranes and/or extracellular matrix, but two recent papers from the group of Anirban Bandyopadhyay at National Institute of Material Sciences (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan (Biosensors and Bioelectronics) have suggested another possibility.
The NIMS group used nanotechnology to study conductive properties of individual microtubules, protein polymers of tubulin (the brain’s most prevalent protein). Major components of the neuronal cytoskeleton, microtubules grow and extend neurons, form and regulate synapses, are disrupted in Alzheimer’s disease, and theoretically linked to information processing, memory encoding and mental states.
Bandyopadhyay’s NIMS group found that microtubules have remarkable electronic conductive properties when excited at certain specific resonant frequencies, e.g. in the low megahertz, precisely the range of TUS.
The findings appeared in an article in the journal Brain Stimulation.
http://www.medindia.net/news/your-mood-could-improve-with-the-help-of-a-brain-ultrasound-119358-1.htm#ixzz3BfPZPF2A
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