Reply to: "Reflecting the causes of variability of EEG responses elicited by cerebellar TMS"

Po-Yu Fong; Danny Spampinato; Kevin Michell; Marco Mancuso; Katlyn Brown; Jaime Ibáñez; Alessandro Di Santo; Anna Latorre; Kailash Bhatia; John C Rothwell; Lorenzo Rocchi

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120392

Reply to: "Reflecting the causes of variability of EEG responses elicited by cerebellar TMS"

Neuroimage. 2023 Nov 1:281:120392. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120392. Epub 2023 Sep 26.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK; Division of Movement Disorders, Department of Neurology and Neuroscience Research Center, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital at Linkou, Taoyuan, Taiwan; Medical School, College of Medicine, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, Taiwan. Electronic address: po-yu.fong.18@ucl.ac.uk.
² Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK; Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation Unit, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Via Ardeatina 306/354, Rome 00142, Italy.
³ UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK.
⁴ Department of Human Neurosciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
⁵ Department of Kinesiology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
⁶ Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK; BSICoS Group, I3A Institute, University of Zaragoza, IIS Aragón, Zaragoza, Spain; Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College, London, UK.
⁷ NEuroMuscular Omnicentre (NEMO), Serena Onlus, AOS Monaldi, Naples, Italy; Unit of Neurology, Department of Medicine, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
⁸ Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK.
⁹ Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK; Department of Medical Sciences and Public Health, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy.

PMID: 37769927
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120392

Abstract

In their commentary on our recently published paper about electroencephalographic responses induced by cerebellar transcranial magnetic stimulation (Fong et al., 2023), Gassmann and colleagues (Gassmann et al., 2023b) try to explain the differences between our results and their own previous work on the same topic. We agree with them that many of the differences arise from our use of a different magnetic stimulation coil. However, two unresolved questions remain. (1) Which method is most likely to achieve optimal activation of cerebellar output? (2) To what extent are the evoked cerebellar responses contaminated by concomitant sensory input? We highlight the role of careful experimental design and of combining electrophysiological and behavioural data to obtain reliable TMS-EEG data.

Keywords: Cerebellar-brain inhibition (CBI); Cerebellum; Electroencephalography (EEG); TMS-EEG; Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).