Comprehensive Summary
This study, conducted by Kazemzadeh et al., analyzes the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on opioid use disorder (OUD) with machine learning. Researchers recruited a total of 50 male subjects aged 18 - 50 years with a history of opioid addiction; 36 of these individuals were randomly assigned to 3 groups - A, receiving left anode/right cathode tDCS; B, receiving right anode/left cathode tDCS; and C, receiving placebo tDCS. The remaining 24 subjects were assigned to a control group. After tDCS treatment, EEG readings were obtained from each subject and examined using an SVM supervised learning algorithm. From the results, it was found that delta, beta, and alpha waves decreased in intensity among groups A and B but remained the same for group C. Additionally, the model was able to distinguish healthy participants from addiction-afflicted patients with high accuracy - 95.78% for the former, and 92.82% for the latter. Finally, researchers analyzed the impact of tDCS on various psychological aspects of OUD, such as opioid cravings, anxiety, and depression. Groups A and B demonstrated an improvement in these addiction attributes, while group C did not experience any significant psychological improvement.
Outcomes and Implications
OUD is a psychiatric disorder that impacts a significant number of people globally - approximately 24 million people worldwide meet the criteria for opioid use disorder. Because of limitations of traditional diagnostic tools for OUD and existing treatments such as medication for OUD, EEG and brain stimulation are being explored a possibly effective alternatives for diagnosis and treatment respectively. Kazemzadeh et al. aims to utilize machine learning to thoroughly examine both of these methods in the context of diagnosis and treatment of OUD. Findings that models were able to accurately detect OUD using EEG data may inform improvements in diagnostic methods for OUD. The efficacy of tDCS in reducing symptoms such as cravings shows promise that brain stimulation techniques may be effective treatments for OUD in the future. However, further research needs to be done with increased sample sizes to ensure that these findings are generalizable.