rTMS for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
rTMS for Anxiety Disorders
PTSD occurs in people who have experienced or witnessed an extremely traumatic experience. After experiencing significant trauma, you may be left repeatedly re-living or re-experiencing that traumatic event.
With rTMS treatment for PTSD, we can strengthen the brain’s ability to process traumatic memories and prevent traumatic memories from intruding into your life.
Traumatic experiences can cause brain changes that result in the traumatic memory being stuck in a loop in particular brain circuits. The brain’s ability to process these traumatic memories also becomes impaired. Your brain’s normal healthy state or “default mode network” shifts to a state where the limbic (emotional) mind becomes more active with less control from the frontal cortex.
The primary treatment for PTSD is psychotherapy, such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy. In addition, medications can help control symptoms related to PTSD.
A recent systematic review of research conducted over the past decade using rTMS for post-traumatic stress disorder found that rTMS had a large positive effect in reducing core symptoms in patients with PTSD (1).
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a non-invasive, highly effective treatment that uses electromagnetic impulses that pass easily through the skull to stimulate abnormal brain activity without any systematic side effects or downtime.
- Kan, R. L., Zhang, B. B., Zhang, J. J., & Kranz, G. S. (2020). Non-invasive brain stimulation for posttraumatic stress disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Translational psychiatry, 10(1), 1-12.
