Scientists at Imperial College London are leading on the development and testing of the new method of stimulating the brain, which could provide an alternative treatment for brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and its associated memory loss.
Known as temporal interference (TI), the non-invasive method works by delivering electrical fields to the brain through electrodes placed on the patient’s scalp and head.
Scientists at Imperial College London are leading on the development and testing of the new method of stimulating the brain, which could provide an alternative treatment for brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and its associated memory loss.

Known as temporal interference (TI), the non-invasive method works by delivering electrical fields to the brain through electrodes placed on the patient’s scalp and head.

Temporal interference:

By targeting the overlapping electrical fields researchers were able to stimulate an area deep in the brain called the hippocampus, without affecting the surrounding areas – a procedure that until now required surgery to implant electrodes into the brain.

The approach has been successfully trialled with 20 healthy volunteers for the first time by a team at the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) at Imperial and the University of Surrey.

Their initial findings, published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, show that when healthy adults perform a memory task whilst receiving TI stimulation it helped to improve memory function.

The team is now conducting a clinical trial in people with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, where they hope TI could be used to improve symptoms of memory loss.

Reaching deep brain regions:

TI was first described by the team at Imperial College London in 2017 and shown to work in principle in mice.

This latest work, funded and carried out through the UK Dementia Research Institute, shows for the first time that TI is effective at stimulating regions deep within the human brain.

According to the researchers, this could have broad applications and will enable scientists to stimulate different deep brain regions to discover more about their functional roles, accelerating the discovery of new therapeutic targets.
In the study, researchers first used post-mortem brain measurements to validate that the electric fields could be remotely focused on the hippocampus – a curved structure deep in the brain which plays a critical role in memory and learning.

The team then applied the TI stimulation to healthy volunteers while they were memorising pairs of faces and names – a process heavily dependent on the hippocampus. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers showed that TI selectively affected the hippocampal activity evoked by the memory task.

Finally, the researchers repeated the procedure for a longer period of 30 minutes. This showed that TI stimulation during the task lead to improved memory accuracy.

Source: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/248635/surgery-free-brain-stimulation-could-provide-treatment/