Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and binge eating disorder clinical and psychophysiological effects

Binge Eating Disorder (BED) is the ingestion of large quantities of food in short periods of time. It affects 2.5% of the worldwide population. Current treatments are based on pharmacologic, psychotherapeutic and nutritional elements, but as the time of treatment is long and costly there has been no right attachment, these conditions are the reason to explore new treatments such as the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS).The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of the TMS over clinical and psychophysiological variables in patients with BED. Food Craving Inventory (FCI), a frequency of binge record and the signal reactivity paradigm with Heart Rate Variability (HRV) record was used. The HRV shows the influence of the autonomic nervous system on the heart rate. For the current study a population of 15 patients with BED (ages from 18 to 45 years) no gender discrimination. Regarding the TMS protocol, the patients were randomly chosen to receive active TMS (n=8) or Sham TMS (n=7), on a program of 15 sessions with a 5Hz stimulation frequency. For data analysis a Wilcoxon test was made using the Graph Pad Prism V6.01. The results show that patients on active TMS procedure had a decrease in the binge events per week 5.9 ±2.1 to 0.75±0.70 with a significant difference (p=0.007), also with a decrease on the FCI 72.4±15.1 to 42±16.8 (p<0.05) and an HRV increase 28.6±3.4 to 36.29±1.9 (p=0.007) compared to the sham TMS, who showed no difference at all. Based on the actual results we concluded that active TMS is effective, according to the improvement of clinical symptoms and HRV reaching normal levels, being confirmed with the Sham procedure which had no results.