Professor Robert Chen
Editor-in-Chief, Clinical Neurophysiology
Daniel Boari Coelho, Artur Cesar Aquino dos Santos, João Ricardo Sato, Marcel Simis, Felipe Fregni, Linamara Rizzo Battistella
There is increasing interest in using non-invasive neuromodulation to improve the outcome of neurorehabilitation. In this volume of Clinical Neurophysiology, Coelho et al. reported a randomized, controlled trial of anodal vs. sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the leg representation of the motor cortex (M1) followed by robot assisted gait training in 26 individuals with incomplete spinal cord injury. The active tDCS group showed higher oxyhemoglobin concentration in the supplementary motor area and the M1, which correlated with improvement measured with the Walking Index Spinal Cord Injury II scale. These results support the potential of using neuromodulation to promote brain plasticity and increase cortical activities, which may improve rehabilitation outcome