(2004). In their study, 1800 pulses of rTMS applied to the primary motor cortex, also at a rate of 5 Hz, produced an increase in MEP amplitude that continued to build up after the stimulation ceased, as demonstrated by a second measurement taken 15 min after the end of the stimulation session. Conceivably, this observation might reflect

a common finding in rTMS studies, in which repeated post-stimulation assessments have been performed. The data from Peinemann et al. (2004) suggest that the amount of stimulation used might this website play a crucial role in determining the time course. It is possible that, depending on the stimulation, different populations of neurons are involved, which react with different time courses due to saturation effects. It should be noted that, in in vitro synaptic plasticity

experiments, which use much higher frequencies (e.g. 100 Hz), typically maximal effects are observed immediately after the stimulation. In our study, application of iHFS clearly cancelled this further increase in cortical excitability. Both groups exhibited an almost identical increase in excitability immediately after rTMS (Δbaseline – rTMS), but the last measurement (Δbaseline – last) demonstrated a marked difference between them (Fig. 4B). Other studies have shown such interactions between learn more tTMS stimulation and subsequent interventions. Delvendahl et al. (2010) showed that pre-treatment with very low-frequency rTMS at 0.1 Hz inhibits the effects of subsequent PAS, whether in its excitatory or inhibitory form. A further study has described a similar effect of 5-Hz rTMS on the subsequent application of either continuous or intermittent theta burst stimulation (Iezzi et al., 2011). In these two studies, the effects of priming are attributed in one case to “antigating” (Delvendahl et al., 2010) and in the other to another non-homeostatic form of interaction (Iezzi et al., 2011). Our experiment resembles these studies in that 5-Hz rTMS effectively abolished the effect of subsequent iHFS on cortical

excitability. However, our study differs in that our “priming” intervention produced a strong effect in excitability, the temporal course of which was altered by subsequent iHFS, in a way that might indicate a homeostatic interaction. In the group without iHFS, the change in paired-pulse suppression seen at the end of the experiment (Δ last – baseline) was strongly dependent on the baseline state of Bcl-w excitability, as demonstrated by a highly significant inverse correlation (Fig. 6D) between the final change in the PPR and the naive state values. Taking this into account, it is possible that normal fluctuations in the population in terms of their state of cortical excitability could explain the observed variability in responses to interventions such as rTMS. The importance of the baseline state of excitability of the brain in shaping the effect of an intervention such as rTMS is becoming increasingly recognized (Silvanto & Pascual-Leone, 2008; Silvanto et al.