Electroconvulsive therapy and determination of cerebral dominance.docVIP

Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry BioMedCentral Review Open Access Electroconvulsive therapy and determination of cerebral dominance Milan Dragovic1, Lindsay Allet2 and Aleksandar Janca*2,3 Address: 1Centre for Clinical Research in Neuropsychiatry, Graylands Hospital, Perth, Australia, 2Inner City Mental Health Service, Royal Perth Hospital, Perth, Australia and 3School of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia Email: Milan Dragovic - milan@.au; Lindsay Allet - Jean.Allet@.au; Aleksandar Janca* - ajanca@.au * Corresponding author Published: 12 August 2004 Received: 30 June 2004 Accepted: 12 August 2004 Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry 2004, 3:14 doi:10.1186/1475-2832-3-14 This article is available from: /content/3/1/14 ? 2004 Dragovic et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) often results in a number of short- and long-time side effects including memory impairment for past and current events, which can last for several months after ECT treatment. It has been suggested that unilateral ECT (uECT) with electrodes placed over the non-dominant (typically right) hemisphere significantly reduces side effects, especially memory disturbances. It is important to note that cerebral dominance equates to speech dominance and avoiding this area of the brain also reduces speech dysfunction after ECT. Traditionally, the routine clinical determination of cerebral dominance has been through the assessment of hand, foot and eye dominance, which is an easy and inexpensive approach that, however, does not ensure accuracy. This review of literature on different methods and techniques