Parkinson’s dysgraphia experimental treatment with rTMS in Exner’s area and Superior Parietal Lobe

Abstract

Neurodegenerative disease is a topic that has been concerning more and more our interesting and is attracting the interest of scientist, from doctors to engineers every year more studies are appearing to try to better understand those diseases. Among them, Parkinson is one of the most widespread among people of above sixty-five years old, being caused by a lack of dopamine affecting the control of movement as well as the quality of life of the patient. One of the less popular methods to deal with neurologic pathologies, is by using hand-writing methods to track the movement of the patient. In the study what we propose is to use rTMS waves to stimulate specific areas of the brain and the results will be tracked before and after the stimulation with the intention to find the best spot to stimulate. Introduction: Therapeutic effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on motor recovery of Parkinson’s disease (PD) have been reported; however, the protocols of these studies varied greatly. The aim of this project is evaluating the effects of stimulation in specific areas Methods: After the recompilation of 109 test with and without rTMS in which the most important features regarding the analysis of handwriting were extracted from PD patients and further submitted to statistical analysis in order to observe behavioral changes. Results: After filtering the data the statistical analysis revealed that the subgroup that received stimulation with 1 Hz showed the most significant changes. In the Exner’s area, a decrease in kinematic features and stimulation the Superior Parietal Lobe (SPL) showed improvement in most of the features considered, specifically the Archimedean spiral and the pentagon drawing were the task with more significant features. High frequency showed HF‐rTMS did not show enough features fitting the defined criteria to draw significant conclusions. Conclusions: In conclusion, a single session of 1Hz‐rTMS over the SPL showed positive effects in the performance of an Archimedean spiral and pentagon drawing. For further research multi-session stimulation should be performed in order to verify if the results may be used to