T010 Generating evidence: On the validity of metaanalyses of transcranial stimulation trials

Publication date: March 2017
Source:Clinical Neurophysiology, Volume 128, Issue 3
Author(s): R. Hamilton
Recent years have witnessed and explosive expansion in the number of investigations in clinical and translational neuroscience that employ transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). In healthy individuals tDCS offers a tool for testing causal relationships between brain regions and their underlying cognitive functions, while in clinical populations tDCS is being investigated for a wide variety of potential indications, ranging from psychiatric conditions to deficits caused by stroke and other neurological disorders. Hundreds of researchers use the technique, and there have been over a thousand publications involving tDCS in the last decade. However, the data currently being gathered across many studies in this field have important limitations, including generally small sample sizes and a high degree of heterogeneity with respect to stimulation parameters (e.g. polarity, intensity, electrode location, etc.). Meta-analysis is an important approach that enables investigators to partially overcome these limitations in order to make broader inferences about the effects of tDCS on cortical physiology and cognition. In this talk, several recent tDCS meta-analyses will be surveyed, in order to highlight the ways in which meta-analysis can contribute novel knowledge to tDCS research. However, research involving meta-analysis is also susceptible to common pitfalls, which will also be discussed. First, concerns related to the selection of studies and to the selection of data from individual studies will be addressed. Subsequently, issues related to the appropriate aggregation of data across studies will be discussed.



http://ift.tt/2lUWma4