Study of Brain Control of Movement

Overview

This study will use transcranial magnetic stimulation to examine how the brain controls movement by sending messages to the spinal cord and muscles and what goes wrong with this process in disease. Normal healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 65 years may be eligible to participate. In transcranial magnetic stimulation, an insulated wire coil is placed on the subject's scalp or skin. Brief electrical currents are passed through the coil, creating magnetic pulses that stimulate the brain. During the stimulation, participants will be asked to tense certain muscles slightly or perform other simple actions. The electrical activity of the muscle will be recorded on a computer through electrodes applied to the skin over the muscle. In most cases, the study will last less than 3 hours.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of voluntary inhibition of movement, using either negative motor imagery or Go/NoGo reaction task, on cortical inhibitory mechanisms. Intracortical inhibition (ICI) and silent period (SP) are two major cortical inhibitory mechanisms demonstrated by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Alterations in these inhibitory mechanisms have been extensively studied in various situations, but the influence of voluntary inhibition has not been elucidated yet. In normal volunteers, therefore, we plan to determine if voluntary inhibition of movement influences these cortical inhibitory mechanisms. The primary outcome measures would be any changes in motor evoked potential (MEP) size and intracortical inhibition (ICI) parameters.

Conditions

Eligibility