The research progress of transcranial direct current stimulation in the treatment of mild cognitive impairment / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a pre-clinical stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In recent years, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), as a neuromodulation technique, has being applied in the field of cognitive intervention for MCI, but its effect is controversial because of many factors. In order to promote the application of tDCS in intervention for MCI, this study performed a systematic review of the previous studies that used tDCS to improve cognitive functions of MCI individuals. The results indicate that tDCS could improve episodic memory, working memory, and language of individuals with MCI, while there is a lack of strong evidence that supports a positive effect of tDCS on attention of individuals with MCI. The placement of electrodes, time course of treatment, and current intensity all affected the intervention effect of tDCS. Future studies should take brain networks underlying cognitive processes and personalized factors such as age and education level into consideration to design better stimulation protocols, and they should be conducted in combination with neuroimaging technologies to evaluate the intervention effect of tDCS more accurately and objectively and to discover the neural mechanisms of tDCS intervention.