Laboratorium voor Neuro- en Psychofysiologie, The Leuven Brain Institute, Leuven, Belgium.
Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Elife. 2022 Sep 13;11:e65536. doi: 10.7554/eLife.65536.
Theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TBS) has become a standard non-invasive technique to induce offline changes in cortical excitability in human volunteers. Yet, TBS suffers from a high variability across subjects. A better knowledge about how TBS affects neural activity in vivo could uncover its mechanisms of action and ultimately allow its mainstream use in basic science and clinical applications. To address this issue, we applied continuous TBS (cTBS, 300 pulses) in awake behaving rhesus monkeys and quantified its after-effects on neuronal activity. Overall, we observed a pronounced, long-lasting, and highly reproducible reduction in neuronal excitability after cTBS in individual parietal neurons, with some neurons also exhibiting periods of hyperexcitability during the recovery phase. These results provide the first experimental evidence of the effects of cTBS on single neurons in awake behaving monkeys, shedding new light on the reasons underlying cTBS variability.
经颅磁刺激的 theta 爆发（TBS）已经成为一种标准的非侵入性技术，可以在人类志愿者中诱导皮质兴奋性的离线变化。然而，TBS 在不同个体之间存在很大的变异性。更好地了解 TBS 如何影响体内的神经活动，可以揭示其作用机制，并最终使其在基础科学和临床应用中得到广泛应用。为了解决这个问题，我们在清醒的猕猴中应用了连续 TBS（cTBS，300 个脉冲），并量化了其对神经元活动的后续影响。总的来说，我们观察到 cTBS 后单个顶叶神经元的兴奋性明显、持久且高度可重复地降低，一些神经元在恢复阶段也表现出兴奋性增强的时期。这些结果提供了 cTBS 对清醒行为猕猴单个神经元影响的第一个实验证据，为 cTBS 变异性的原因提供了新的见解。
