Prediction of clinical outcomes from rTMS in depressed patients with lateral visual field stimulation: a replication

The authors sought to replicate an earlier finding that baseline lateral visual field stimulation, a procedure shown to activate the contralateral hemisphere and induce affective changes, predicted the clinical outcomes of a 10-day course of left-sided rapid transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). For 23 patients there was a significant 1-tailed Pearson correlation between the percent improvement in response to rTMS and their lateralized affective responses to lateral visual field stimulation. These correlations, across the whole group and within genders, were almost identical to those previously reported from 37 patients studied at a different site.