Study of Hybrid Therapy with Peripheral Nerve Stimulations and Biofeedback

— Hybrid BF Enforces both Conditioned and Unconditioned Stimulus? —

Abstract

  Biofeedback (BF) treatments have some effects on intractable diseases but they often slow and easy to fade away. On the other hand many peripheral nerve stimulations have sometimes direct and fast effects in several cases. We have tried to combine the two methods (H-BF : Hybrid Bio-Feedback) in order to improve the BF treatment including Alzheimer dementia and Parkinson tremor. The H-BF for tremor shows the normalization of tremor frequency as well as decreasing of tremor intensity. The H-BF of light/electric/mechanical stimulation with pupil image BF for dementia shows improvement on HDS-R, MMSE, POMS and BPSD. The reason for the dominance of H-BF may be that the peripheral stimulation (PS) can collaborate with BF to enforce both conditional and unconditional stimulus, which enables to produce stronger responses, comparing single treatment of BF or PS.