Occlusion of synaptic plasticity by gating

Introduction: Intracortical Inhibition is discussed as gating mechanism for the induction of synaptic plasticity. This study investigates if the occlusion of synaptic plasticity induced by paired associative stimulation (PAS) by prior very low frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is mediated by enhanced intracortical inhibition Methods: We performed rTMS on 10 healthy volunteers (mean age 25±2 years). RTMS consisted of 250 stimuli at a frequency of 0.1Hz. Before and after this intervention we measured amplitudes of motor evoked potentials (MEP), resting motor threshold (MT), intracortica…