Doctors in Shijiazhuang, China, shifted a magnetic coil from a stroke patient's motor cortex to his forehead, and his uncontrollable laughing stopped. They moved it back, and it started again.
That test, repeated in two separate men, is the core of a case series published Sept. 4 in Frontiers in Psychiatry by neurologists Shusheng Jiao and Xiuhong Xu of Bethune International Peace Hospital. Both patients were undergoing repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS, a noninvasive treatment being studied to help stroke survivors regain arm function. Neither found anything funny. The authors report this as the first documented account of rTMS-induced ictal laughter in stroke patients. The only comparable prior report involved a 6-year-old boy with autism receiving a much more intensive protocol.
