The Animal Studies Of The Technical Safety Of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of human brain is a newly developed clinical neurophysiological technique aimed at evaluation of the motor functions of the central nervous system. The safety aspect of TMS is still contraversial and more clinical and experimental reserches are required to reach an overall and objective conclusion. Up to now few investigations in this field bave been made and one of the reasons is the suspending vadality of experimental animals, especially the small ones. In our study, we tried to prove, by neurophysiological methods, the vadality of rat as the experimental animal in TMS safety studies and made preliminary investigation of the effects of TMS on some behaviors and brain histological and ultrastructural morphology of rats.In vadality study, rats received magnetic brain stimulation (MBS) and anodal electric brain stimulation and the evoked motor potetials were recorded by concentric EMG needle at hindlimb muscles. It was found that MBS was able to elicit CMAPs, which (?) be suppressed by deep anesthesia, and the average latency of CMAPs at supramaximal intensity was 6.52 ms, 1.35 ms later than that by EBS; CMAPs could also be elicited by magnetic...