Evidence map›Paper›PMID 25172954›Full record

ReviewThe Journal of physiology2014

Corticospinal activity evoked and modulated by non-invasive stimulation of the intact human motor cortex.

Vincenzo Di Lazzaro, John C Rothwell

Abstract readReview
PubMed Full text at PMC Publisher
In one paragraph

Review in The Journal of physiology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 140 papers, 8 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
140citing papers in PubMed, 8 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

140 citing papers in PubMed, 8 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.

  1. Pooled it
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  6. Transcranial electric stimulation motor evoked potentials for cervical spine intraoperative monitoring complications: systematic review and illustrative case of cardiac arrest.European spine journal : official publication of the European Spine Society, the European Spinal Deformity Society, and the European Section of the Cervical Spine Research Society · 2022
    Pooled it
  7. Safety and recommendations for TMS use in healthy subjects and patient populations, with updates on training, ethical and regulatory issues: Expert Guidelines.Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2021
    Guideline
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  11. Tracking the corticospinal responses to strength training.European journal of applied physiology · 2020
    Trial
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  20. Recovery of Dexterous Motor Control via Non-Monosynaptic Corticospinal Pathways.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026
    Article

80 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Vincenzo Di LazzaroInstitute of Neurology, Campus Biomedico University, Via Alvaro del Portillo 200, 00128, Rome, Italy Fondazione Alberto Sordi - Research Institute for Ageing, Rome, Italy v.dilazzaro@unicampus.it.
John C RothwellSobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, UCL Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London, WC1N 3BG, UK.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

A number of methods have been developed recently that stimulate the human brain non-invasively through the intact scalp. The most common are transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), transcranial electric stimulation (TES) and transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS). They are widely used to probe function and connectivity of brain areas as well as therapeutically in a variety of conditions such as depression or stroke. They are much less focal than conventional invasive methods which use small electrodes placed on or in the brain and are often thought to activate all classes of neurones in the stimulated area. However, this is not true. A large body of evidence from experiments on the motor cortex shows that non-invasive methods of brain stimulation can be surprisingly selective and that adjusting the intensity and direction of stimulation can activate different classes of inhibitory and excitatory inputs to the corticospinal output cells. Here we review data that have elucidated the action of TMS and TES, concentrating mainly on the most direct evidence available from spinal epidural recordings of the descending corticospinal volleys. The results show that it is potentially possible to test and condition specific neural circuits in motor cortex that could be affected differentially by disease, or be used in different forms of natural behaviour. However, there is substantial interindividual variability in the specificity of these protocols. Perhaps in the future it will be possible, with the advances currently being made to model the electrical fields induced in individual brains, to develop forms of stimulation that can reliably target more specific populations of neurones, and open up the internal circuitry of the motor cortex for study in behaving humans.

Indexed as

ElectromyographyEvoked Potentials, MotorHumansMotor CortexMuscle, SkeletalPyramidal TractsTranscranial Direct Current StimulationTranscranial Magnetic Stimulation

Identifiers

PMID25172954
PMCPMC4215763

What OpenQuestion holds

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Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.