Noninvasive magnetic stimulation of a specific brain region that regulates self-control significantly reduced how much people smoked, reduced nicotine cravings and may help people quit, finds new double-blind, sham-controlled randomized clinical trial.

Me: reads headline. “DLPFC or insula”? ”

Reads abstract…

Oh, they also tried the orbital prefrontal cortex. Not a common Target, partly because it can hurt like fuck. Interesting, though that Target didn’t work, of course it was a good old DLPFC!! Winner of all TMS research, regardless of topic.

Possibly an interesting study. I didn’t get past the abstract because it’s early in the morning, and well who has time to read papers anymore. But they did a targeted to approach incorporating electrical field modeling, which is some pretty state-of-the-art stuff. Hot topics.

This looks like one of those new NIH grants where they make you run a pile of trial and then if you achieve a certain success they give you enough money to run a clinical trial. Small sample, three conditions, evidence of target engagement in the brain.

There are already a fair number of trials that they’re looking at smoking cessation using smaller sample sizes, so one could criticize how much this really contributes…. But a larger trial with something precision based might be interesting, especially if they compare precision versus treatment as usual which is really what we need right now. The idea that precision targeting with fmri works is far from established.

Cool cool.