Abstract:
Anxiety is one of the most prevalent and debilitating psychiatric conditions
worldwide. Pharmaco- and psycho-therapies have been employed in the treatment of
human anxiety to date. Yet, either alone or in combination, unsatisfactory patient outcomes
are prevalent, resulting in a considerable number of people whose symptoms fail to respond
to conventional therapies with symptoms remaining after intervention. The demand for new
therapies has given birth to several noninvasive brain stimulation techniques. Transcranial
direct current stimulation (tDCS) has arisen as a promising tool and has been proven to be
safe and well tolerated for the treatment of many diseases, including chronic pain, depression, and anxiety. Here, reports of the use of tDCS in anxiety disorders in human patients
were reviewed and summarized. A literature search was conducted in mid-2019, to identify
clinical studies that evaluated the use of tDCS for the treatment of anxiety behavior. The
PubMed, Web of Science, and Scielo and PsycInfo databases were explored using the
following descriptors: “anxiety”, “anxious behavior”, “tDCS”, and “transcranial direct current stimulation”. Among the selected articles, considerable variability in the type of tDCS
treatment applied in interventions was observed. Evidence shows that tDCS may be more
effective when used in combination with drugs and cognitive behavioral therapies; however
future large-scale clinical trials are recommended to better clarify the real effects of this
intervention alone, or in combination with others.
