The Effects of HD-tDCS on Cognitive Bias Among Individuals With Social Anxiety Symptoms

South China Normal University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Social Anxiety Disorder

Treatments: Device: Active High-definition transcranial direct current stimulation; Device: Sham high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT07099521

SCNU-PSY-2024-185

Details and patient eligibility

About

To examine the offline effects of high-definition tDCS (HD-tDCS) on attention, interpretation and memory biases in youth with social anxiety.

Full description

In current study, we adopted a comparative intervention study with randomized controlled in which we delivered multiple courses of offline anodal HD-tDCS over the left DLPFC. The aim of this study was to explore the offline impact of HD-tDCS on cognitive bias (including attention, interpretation and memory bias) among youth with social anxiety symptoms. In addition, the researchers sought to further investigate the impact of tDCS stimulation on social anxiety. We hypothesized that anodal tDCS would activates the left DLPFC to facilitate cognitive control of threat-related information among youth with social anxiety, thereby reducing threat attention, interpretation and memory bias, and even improving social anxiety symptoms.

Enrollment: 74 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 24 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• 18 -24 years old
• No history of major organic brain diseases or mental disorders, and currently not taking hormone or mental disorder drugs, with no drug or alcohol dependence;
• No experience of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in the past six months;
• Participants are willing to participate and fill out the informed consent form;
• The score of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) is less than 5 points;
• The score of the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) is greater than or equal to 55 points

Exclusion criteria

• any psychiatric disorders;
• current or past diseases or injuries related to the brain;
• medical pumps, pacemakers and cochlear implants in the body;
• current pharmacological or mental treatments;
• tDCS or TMS experiences over past year were also excluded.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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74 participants in 2 patient groups

tDCS group

Active Comparator group

Description:

Participants underwent 10 sessions of anodal (2mA, 20 minutes) HD-tDCS over 5 days targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).

Treatment:

Device: Active High-definition transcranial direct current stimulation

Sham group

Sham Comparator group

Description:

Participants underwent 10 sessions of sham HD-tDCS over 5 days targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).

Treatment:

Device: Sham high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation