Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation in Chronic Psychiatric Patients

Condition(s) studied

Investigational drug(s) / intervention(s)

CES: Currently, most CES intervention studies are applied to the general public, and a few studies focus on athletic performance. There are no related studies on residents of psychiatric nursing homes, nor are there any research designs for improving cognitive impairment. Therefore, this study explores the use of CES programs to improve the cognition, anxiety, depression, and other conditions of residents of psychiatric care homes, with the goal of improving their quality of life.

Study summary

This randomized, gender-stratified study evaluated cranial electrotherapy stimulation (CES) in residents with chronic psychiatric disorders living in a psychiatric nursing home. Seventy participants were randomly assigned to early CES or delayed CES (35 per group). The early-CES group received 40-minute sessions five days a week for 12 weeks (60 sessions). Participants were assessed at baseline, at 12 weeks, and 3 and 6 months after the 12-week period. The delayed-CES group began CES after the week-12 assessment. The study examined changes over time under these two treatment schedules.

Eligibility

Primary outcome measure(s)

• sleep — "From enrollment to the end of treatment at 12 weeks"
  The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Inventory (PSQI) is a self-administered questionnaire developed by Buysse et al. (1989). They felt that sleep quality has become an important issue in clinical practice, so they referred to the existing sleep quality scale and developed it into a self-administered questionnaire that can explore sleep conditions in the past month. This scale can be used as a self-assessment tool to measure sleep quality. Its content covers seven sub-concepts, including self-assessed sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep duration, sleep efficiency, sleep disturbance, use of sleeping pills, and daytime function.
• Depression — "From enrollment to the end of treatment at 12weeks"
  This study used the Taiwanese Depression Scale (TDS) revised by scholar Yu (2011). The purpose of this scale is to screen cases with depressive symptoms. It has a total of 18 questions, and each question is divided into 0 points (no or very few symptoms), 1 point (sometimes there are symptoms), 2 points (often there are symptoms), and 3 points (often or always there are symptoms) according to the severity. The total score ranges from 0 to 54 points. The higher the score, the more severe the depressive symptoms (Yu, Huang, and Liu, 2011). Lee et al. conducted a reliability and validity analysis on 107 community residents using this scale and found that the internal consistency Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.90. The DSM III-R (Edition, Revised) was used as the diagnostic standard. After the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis, it was found that the total score of 19 points was the best cut-off point for diagnosing depression, with a sensitivity of 0.89 and a speci

Trial sites (1)

Other trials for the same condition