Does TMS help to Better Understand Schizophrenia and Mechanisms of Neuroleptic Treatment?

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) provides an intriguing in vivo method to investigate motor cortex excitability in men. This offers new insights into the neurophysiological effects of neuroleptic drug treatment. We studied several TMS paradigms in first-episode schizophrenic patients before treatment initiation and under steady-state conditions with different neuroleptic drugs. The patient group demonstrated a significantly lower resting motor threshold as compared with healthy controls, whereas TMS paradigms of cortical silent period, intracortical inhibition and intracortical facilitation failed to show…