A 6-year-old boy with autism in Beijing began having sudden, uncontrollable bursts of laughter during a four-week trial of high-dose magnetic brain stimulation. Three months after treatment ended, his mother reported that the laughing had not stopped, though it came less often.
Researchers at Beijing Bo'ai Hospital, part of the China Rehabilitation Research Center, described the boy in a case report in Clinical Case Reports in July 2025. To their knowledge, they wrote, no earlier study had reported repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS, triggering excessive laughter in children with autism.
