Dear Colleagues,
After the first meeting in 1998 and the second in 2003, the “Third International Conference on Transcranial Magnetic and Direct Current Stimulation” will take place on October 1-4, 2008 in Göttingen. On behalf of the program committee, I would like to invite you to Göttingen to join a stimulating and highly interesting assembly in the ever expanding field of transcranial stimulation. Insightful techniques such as theta burst stimulation and tDCS have been under continual development in the last five years; in parallel, clinical studies indicate clinical efficacy in a variety of diseases, although funding of multicenter studies is distinctly more difficult to achieve than funding for the development of new drugs. Combinatorial studies integrating transcranial stimulation with recording techniques such as fMRI, have further served to increase our knowledge. Pharmacological modulation contributes increasingly to the efficacy and specificity of rTMS and tDCS aftereffects.
There is a continuous need to bring together knowledge from basic neurophysiological science with clinical demands in order to advance the field further. We anticipate that a special issue of the new journal “Brain Stimulation” will highlight the conference, with printed abstracts and consensus papers allowing researchers and clinicians to focus discussions on topics of uncertainty or controversy. We also expect contributions to be again printed in a Clinical Neurophysiology Supplement book.
This meeting has been enabled by generous grants from the „Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft“ DFG, the „German Society for Clinical Neurophysiology“ DGKN, the „Movement Disorder Society“ MDS, from the State of Lower Saxony and by support from the University of Göttingen. We are also grateful for support from the exhibitors and organisational support from EUMECOM.
Most important, however, will be your participation and active contribution to the meeting.
Looking forward to see you here in Göttingen
Walter Paulus
On behalf of the program committee