Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Neurofeedback Gains Popularity and Lab Attention

The New York Times ran a feature story about neurofeedback in its October 4, 2010 edition. It reported that there are an estimated 7,500 mental health professionals in the US now offering neurofeedback as part of their services and that more than 100,000 Americans have tried it over the past decade.

John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University, published a small study in 2007 suggesting that the treatment speeded cognitive processing in elderly people. “There’s no question that neurofeedback works, that people can change brain activity,” he said. “The big questions we still haven’t answered are precisely how it works and how it can be harnessed to treat disorders.”

Neurofeedback was developed in the 1960s and ’70s, with American researchers leading the way. In 1968, M. Barry Sterman, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported that the training helped cats resist epileptic seizures. Dr. Sterman and others later claimed to have achieved similar benefits with humans.

The findings prompted a boomlet of interest in which clinicians of varying degrees of respectability jumped into the field, making many unsupported claims about seeming miracle cures and tainting the treatment’s reputation among academic experts. Meanwhile, researchers in Germany and the Netherlands continued to explore neurofeedback’s potential benefits.

A major attraction of the technique is the hope that it can help patients avoid drugs, which often have side effects. Instead, patients practice routines that seem more like exercising a muscle. Brain cells communicate with one another, in part, through a constant storm of electrical impulses. Their patterns show up on an electroencephalogram, or EEG, as brain waves with different frequencies.

Neurofeedback practitioners say people have problems when their brain wave frequencies aren’t suited for the task at hand, or when parts of the brain aren’t communicating adequately with other parts. These issues, they say, can be represented on a “brain map,” the initial EEG readings that serve as a guide for treatment. Subsequently, a clinician will help a patient learn to slow down or speed up those brain waves, through a process known as operant conditioning. The brain begins by generating fairly random patterns, while the computer software responds with encouragement whenever the activity meets the target.

Dr. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research at Columbia and the author of “The Brain That Changes Itself” (Viking, 2007), said he considered neurofeedback “a powerful stabilizer of the brain.”

Practitioners make even more enthusiastic claims. Robert Coben, a neuropsychologist in Massapequa Park, N.Y., said he had treated more than 1,000 autistic children over the past seven years and had conducted a clinical study, finding striking reductions in symptoms, as reported by parents.

To read the full article, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/health/05neurofeedback.html?pagewanted=1

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home