Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) improves picture naming in Alzheimer Disease and Frontotemporal dementia.

Objective: Examine whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could improve picture naming abilities in people living with mild dementia (Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal forms). Background: There is no symptomatic therapy for FTD. Non-invasive electrical stimulation with tDCS might offer a safe and inexpensive therapy for cognitive disorders. Design/Methods: Utilizing a double-blind cross-over design, twelve participants were trained on picture naming over a series of 10 sessions with accompanying 30 minutes of anodal (2 mA) tDCS stimulation applied to the parietal lobe (P3) or sham stimulation. Evaluation was carried out before stimulation, on the final stimulation session, two weeks post-stimulation, and two months post-stimulation. We evaluated performance on a trained picture naming set, on an equivalent untrained set, and on a set of additional neuropsychological tasks. Results: Participants improved significantly more on the training picture naming set after receiving real anodal stimulation compared with sham tDCS. Furthermore, after real stimulation, participants maintained significantly higher naming scores at all evaluations, including two months post-stimulation. For untrained picture naming items, participants also benefited significantly more from real anodal stimulation than sham stimulation. When parietal stimulation was given, participants demonstrated an improvement that remained significant two months post stimulation, in contrast to a significant decrease two months post-stimulation when sham stimulation was given. Finally, participants showed a small increase for digit span when they received real anodal parietal stimulation, but a decrease when sham stimulation was received. Conclusions: These results suggest that tDCS stimulation has promise as a treatment for the anomia of individuals with dementia, and the beneficial effect appears to generalize to unstudied items as well as attention. Further studies are warranted. Study Supported by: Canadian Institutes of Health Research Disclosure: Dr. Chertkow has nothing to disclose. Dr. Roncero has nothing to disclose. Dr. Kneifel has nothing to disclose. Dr. Thiel has nothing to disclose. Dr. Probst has nothing to disclose. Dr. Malus has nothing to disclose. Dr. Solomon has nothing to disclose.