Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of the Primary Motor Cortex beyond Motor Rehabilitation: A Review of the Current Evidence

• Published in: Brain sciences Vol. 12; no. 6; p. 761
• Main Authors: Tomeh, Abdulhameed, Yusof Khan, Abdul Hanif Khan, Inche Mat, Liyana Najwa, Basri, Hamidon, Wan Sulaiman, Wan Aliaa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 10.06.2022; MDPI
• Subjects: Achievement tests; Analgesics; Anxiety; Bladder; Cognitive ability; Consciousness; Cortex (motor); Dysphagia; Fatigue; Headaches; Hemiplegia; Magnetic fields; Magnetic resonance imaging; Narcotics; non-motor symptoms; Pain; primary motor cortex; Rehabilitation; Review; Scalp; Sleep disorders; Spasticity; Stroke; therapeutic use; Transcranial magnetic stimulation
• ISSN: 2076-3425; 2076-3425
• DOI: 10.3390/brainsci12060761

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has emerged as a novel technique to stimulate the human brain through the scalp. Over the years, identifying the optimal brain region and stimulation parameters has been a subject of debate in the literature on therapeutic uses of repetitive TMS (rTMS). Nevertheless, the primary motor cortex (M1) has been a conventional target for rTMS to treat motor symptoms, such as hemiplegia and spasticity, as it controls the voluntary movement of the body. However, with an expanding knowledge base of the M1 cortical and subcortical connections, M1-rTMS has shown a therapeutic efficacy that goes beyond the conventional motor rehabilitation to involve pain, headache, fatigue, dysphagia, speech and voice impairments, sleep disorders, cognitive dysfunction, disorders of consciousness, anxiety, depression, and bladder dysfunction. In this review, we summarize the latest evidence on using M1-rTMS to treat non-motor symptoms of diverse etiologies and discuss the potential mechanistic rationale behind the management of each of these symptoms.