Abstract
Introduction: The symptoms that patients with schizophrenia experience during schizophrenia are divided into two positive and negative symptoms. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on both positive and negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia.
Methods: This experimental study was a pretest-posttest plan consisting of patients with schizophrenia in Razi psychiatric hospital in Tabriz, of which 30 patients were selected in a targeted and available manner and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The experimental group underwent anodal tDCS treatment for ten sessions of 20 minutes at 72-hour intervals, while the control group underwent dummy treatment in the same manner. The research data were collected using The Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS) and analyzed using the covariance analysis method with SPSS software.
Results: The results of statistical analysis showed that tDCS has a significant effect on negative and general symptoms of schizophrenia (P=0.01) but has no significant effect on positive symptoms (P≤0.05).
Conclusion: To the results of the present study, we concluded that tDCS is a suitable therapeutic tool in the treatment of pathological symptoms of schizophrenia.