Yale School of Medicine researchers are recruiting patients nationally for a clinical trial using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to help still the voices that are so troubling to some persons with schizophrenia.
"These hallucinations, which consist of spoken speech that are labeled 'voices' by patients themselves, are often very disabling and resistant to currently available medication therapies," said Ralph Hoffman, M.D., a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and principal investigator of the study.
Hoffman has received a $2.1 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to expand the research to include 90 patients. There are funds to fly patients to New Haven, where they will stay on a research unit during the five-to-eight week period that they are in the clinical trial. TMS generally is painless and is experienced as a knocking sensation. It is administered while persons are awake by positioning an electromagnetic coil on the scalp.
"It appears that stimulating populations of neurons once per second with TMS over many minutes modestly reduces the capacity of these neurons to activate each other," Hoffman said. "As a result, neural populations as a whole become less reactive or excitable. Our study findings suggest that hallucinations can be curtailed using this approach without interfering with normal brain function."