On October 22nd, the reporter learned from Harbin First Specialized Hospital that Dr. Han Yunyi of the hospital has discovered a new method that can effectively improve negative symptoms of schizophrenia. The relevant results were recently published in the international neuroregulatory journal "Brain Stimulation". Schizophrenia patients not only have positive symptoms such as hallucinations, hallucinations, delusions, and thinking disorders, but also often have negative symptoms such as emotional dullness, social withdrawal, lack of willpower, and poor speech. The latter is often overlooked by patients and their families. At present, drug therapy has a good therapeutic effect on positive symptoms, but it does not have a significant effect on negative symptoms. At present, non-invasive neural regulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation have gradually been used for the treatment of negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. However, there are still many shortcomings in conventional targets and stimulation methods that need further optimization. With the support of the Beijing Natural Science Foundation, Han Yunyi cooperated with the scientific researchers of the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to deeply reveal the neural mechanism of a new type of magnetic stimulation - individualized accelerated intermittent θ wave stimulation to improve negative symptoms, and carried out a randomized, controlled, double-blind clinical study. A total of 80 schizophrenia patients with negative symptoms were included in the study, and the researchers randomly divided them into a true stimulation group and a pseudo stimulation group. The true stimulation group received personalized accelerated intermittent theta wave stimulation treatment for 10 days, with 4 stimuli per day and 1800 pulses per session. The pseudo stimulation group and the real stimulation group underwent the same treatment process, but the stimulator did not generate any magnetic stimulation. The comparative results showed that in the fourth week after treatment, the negative symptoms of the true stimulation group were significantly reduced, and its effect was significantly better than that of the pseudo stimulation group. The response rates of the two groups (i.e. those with negative symptoms relieved by more than 50%) were 77.5% and 17.5%, respectively. The negative symptom score of the true stimulation group decreased by 4.10 points compared to the average value of the pseudo stimulation group, and the effect size reached 0.83, indicating a moderate to high therapeutic effect, and the efficacy remained significant during the 3-month follow-up period. In addition, the study also found that patients in the true stimulation group showed a significant decrease in left middle temporal gyrus nerve activity after treatment, and the functional connectivity between the midbrain and middle temporal gyrus was relatively weakened. These changes in neural activity are closely related to the improvement of negative symptoms. From the experimental results, it can be seen that this treatment plan effectively improves the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and provides a new treatment option for schizophrenia patients. Next, Han Yunyi will also plan to conduct larger sample size multicenter clinical studies to further validate the optimal combination of iTBS treatment parameters, enabling more patients to receive sustained and convenient treatment services. (New Society)