Editorial: The safety and efficacy of noninvasive brain stimulation in development and neurodevelopmental disorders

Citation: Oberman LM and Enticott PG (2015) Editorial: The safety and efficacy of noninvasive brain stimulation in development and neurodevelopmental disorders. Noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) are emerging as neuroscientific techniques that can be used as in vivo probes of brain function as well as therapeutic tools in a number of psychiatric and neurological disorders. Though much of the research and applications with these techniques have been applied to adult psychiatry and neurology, recent years have seen a number of researchers applying these tools to study brain development in typically developing children as well as those with neurodevelopmental and child psychiatric and neurological disorders. Clinical trials and case series designs have also been used to develop novel therapeutic interventions using these NIBS techniques in pediatric clinical populations and researchers are forming working groups dedicated to the application of NIBS to specific neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., Autism Spectrum Disorder, Oberman et al., 2014a). The papers in this research topic highlight the excitement in the field and the promise of these techniques both for the understanding of neurodevelopment (Pedapati et al., 2015) and neuropathology of neurodevelopmental disorders (Croarkin et al., 2014; Oberman et al., 2014b) as well as novel treatment development for neurodevelopmental disorders (Casanova et al., 2014; Gillick et al., 2014). This excitement and promise, however, is appropriately tempered by other papers in this research topic that highlight the unknown risks and potential ethical concerns related to applying these techniques in pediatric populations (Davis, 2014; Maslen et al., 2014). A recent metaanalysis (Rajapakse and Kirton, 2013) reviewed the studies to date involving all rTMS protocols in children (approximately 1000 children have been studied across all rTMS protocols to date) and concluded " Its minimal risk, excellent tolerability and increasingly sophisticated ability to interrogate neurophysiology and plasticity make it an enviable technology for use in pediatric research with future extension into therapeutic trials. " This was supported by a paper in this topic highlighting the safety and tolerability of a specific paradigm, Theta Burst stimulation (Hong et al., 2015). The most serious possible TMS-related adverse event is induction of a seizure. To date, 16 cases of TMS-induced seizures have been reported out of tens of thousands of examined subjects over the past 25 years. Overall the risk of seizure is considered to be less than 0.01% across all patients and all paradigms …