Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2010 Dec 8;5(12):e15155. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015155.
The use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to assess changes in cortical excitability is a tool used with increased prevalence in healthy and impaired populations. One factor of concern with this technique is how to achieve adequate statistical power given constraints of a small number of subjects and variability in responses. This paper compares a single pulse excitability measure using traditional group-level statistics vs single subject analyses in a patient population of subjects with focal hand dystonia, pre and post repetitive TMS (rTMS). Results show significant differences in cortical excitability for 4/5 subjects using a split middle line analysis on plots of individual subject data. Group level statistics (ANOVA), however, did not detect any significant findings. The consideration of single subject statistics for TMS excitability measures may assist researchers in describing the variably of rTMS outcome measures.
经颅磁刺激（TMS）用于评估皮质兴奋性变化，在健康人群和受损人群中越来越多地被使用。该技术存在一个关注因素，即如何在受试者数量较少且反应变异性较大的情况下，实现足够的统计功效。本文比较了使用传统的组级统计方法和单个受试者分析方法，在患有局灶性手部运动障碍的患者人群中，在重复经颅磁刺激（rTMS）之前和之后，对单个脉冲兴奋性测量进行比较。结果显示，在对个体受试者数据图进行中线分割分析时，4/5 名受试者的皮质兴奋性存在显著差异。然而，组级统计（方差分析）并未检测到任何显著发现。对 TMS 兴奋性测量的单个受试者统计数据的考虑，可能有助于研究人员描述 rTMS 结果测量的变异性。
