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Review
. 2022 Jun 10;12(6):761.
doi: 10.3390/brainsci12060761.

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of the Primary Motor Cortex beyond Motor Rehabilitation: A Review of the Current Evidence

Abdulhameed Tomeh  1 , Abdul Hanif Khan Yusof Khan  1   2 , Liyana Najwa Inche Mat  1 , Hamidon Basri  1 , Wan Aliaa Wan Sulaiman  1   2
Affiliations
Review

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of the Primary Motor Cortex beyond Motor Rehabilitation: A Review of the Current Evidence

Abdulhameed Tomeh et al. Brain Sci. .

Abstract

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has emerged as a novel technique to stimulate the human brain through the scalp. Over the years, identifying the optimal brain region and stimulation parameters has been a subject of debate in the literature on therapeutic uses of repetitive TMS (rTMS). Nevertheless, the primary motor cortex (M1) has been a conventional target for rTMS to treat motor symptoms, such as hemiplegia and spasticity, as it controls the voluntary movement of the body. However, with an expanding knowledge base of the M1 cortical and subcortical connections, M1-rTMS has shown a therapeutic efficacy that goes beyond the conventional motor rehabilitation to involve pain, headache, fatigue, dysphagia, speech and voice impairments, sleep disorders, cognitive dysfunction, disorders of consciousness, anxiety, depression, and bladder dysfunction. In this review, we summarize the latest evidence on using M1-rTMS to treat non-motor symptoms of diverse etiologies and discuss the potential mechanistic rationale behind the management of each of these symptoms.

Keywords: non-motor symptoms; primary motor cortex; therapeutic use; transcranial magnetic stimulation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Graphical abstract summarizing the non-motor symptoms treated with M1-rTMS. ‡‡‡ denotes strong recommendation by current therapeutic guidelines, ‡‡ denotes moderate recommendation by current therapeutic guidelines, ‡ denotes weak recommendation by current therapeutic guidelines, * denotes supported by systematic reviews/meta-analyses. Figure created with BioRender.com (accessed on 19 November 2021).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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