The effect of theta burst stimulation on cognitive functions in alzheimer's dementia

Alzheimer's disease (AD), besides being the most common type of dementia, is one of the primary degenerative dementias who seincidence increases in direct proportion to age. Currently, there is no definitive treatment for AD that has been developed and has been found to completely eliminate the disease. Pharmacological methods used for this purpose may be insufficient and the use of non-pharmacological treatmentmethods is gaining importance day by day. One of the non-pharmacological methodsused is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. In this study weconducted in patients with AD, we wanted to determine the change in neurocognitive function swith psychometric tests after 10 sessions of treatment applied to the DLPFC region with the iTBS protocol with a special stimulation pattern. Twenty-eight patients with mild AD, aged 63-90 years, were included in our study. In the study, 14 patients received real stimulation therapy and 14 patients formed the sham group. Both groups were evaluated in terms of learning and memory, complex attention, executive functions, language, perceptual-motor functions before and after the protocol. It was observed that there was improvement in many neurocognitive areas with the SMMT, Stroop Test, Clock Drawing Test, and ADAS-Cog tests. Considering the effects of the iTBS protocol in Alzheimer's Disease, it deserves further investigation. It is necessary to investigate whether this change detected by neurocognitive tests also causes changes in neuroimaging and biomarkers.