Looking for a Specific Kind of Research Study (Neurostimulation)

[BHL 20]

I'm doing a master's degree, and I would like to research the long-term effects of neurostimulation on the brain.

It would be really helpful if I could find at least one research study that: (1) Performed MRI scans on a cohort of patients, preferably using diffusion MRI. (2) Had this cohort of patients undergo neurostimulation. I'm open to looking at neurostimulation of any kind, it can be DBS, TMS, DCS or any other type. (3) Followed up with the patients at least once after several months and assessed clinical outcomes.

This sounds simple enough. But looking through research studies, a lot of them don't tend to involve any MRI scans. A lot of those that do involve MRI tend to be shorter-term studies. I managed to find one paper that sort of did what I want, but it was a strange study carried out on a single patient. So wouldn't have any statistical significance.

Anyone know of a study like this? Would really appreciate it.

 

[jedishrfu]

Perhaps your profs can help here either by finding one or pointing to an expert who knows the field well.

This seems to be a very specialized request and unlikely to find anyone at PF who can answer it well.

 

[jedishrfu]

Another resource might be to contact the journals that specialize in the field and also your college reference librarians might have some insight too.

 

[Godot_]

NCBI gave 19 PubMed hits with "neurostimulation and (long-term and effects) and (MRI or fMRI or (MRI and diffusion))"... ...but you probably did that search already.

Using "fMRI and neurostimulation" as search terms listed 28 hits in ClinicalTrials.gov. Those people might or might not know about other, maybe not yet published studies. And they may or may not be helpful when contacted... ...you know, competition, publish or perish, first, yadda yadda...

 

[pinball1970]

I'm doing a master's degree, and I would like to research the long-term effects of neurostimulation on the brain.

It would be really helpful if I could find at least one research study that: (1) Performed MRI scans on a cohort of patients, preferably using diffusion MRI. (2) Had this cohort of patients undergo neurostimulation. I'm open to looking at neurostimulation of any kind, it can be DBS, TMS, DCS or any other type. (3) Followed up with the patients at least once after several months and assessed clinical outcomes.

This sounds simple enough. But looking through research studies, a lot of them don't tend to involve any MRI scans. A lot of those that do involve MRI tend to be shorter-term studies. I managed to find one paper that sort of did what I want, but it was a strange study carried out on a single patient. So wouldn't have any statistical significance.

Anyone know of a study like this? Would really appreciate it.

Have you tried Cochrane?

A quick search gave the below but there could be other related links/papers

https://www.cochrane.org/CD008497/E...s-contact-brain-treat-drug-resistant-epilepsy

 

[BHL 20]

Thanks to everyone for the advice. It seems hard to find something like this through a direct search on any website, and I don't think any of professors at my college specialize in neurostimulation, but I managed to find a study like I described being cited in different paper I was reading. The researchers performed diffusion MRI on 90 Parkinson's patients and tried to find correlations to clinical outcomes (after 1 year). Exactly what I wanted. For anyone interested here it is: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ana.24974