New Method Shows Promise for Treating Motion Sickness

A team led by researchers is working on a treatment they say has potential to offer benefits on par with the best motion sickness treatments available.

According to the investigators, the treatment consists of applying electrodes to the scalp, which delivers a mild electrical current to the brain that lasts for approximately 10 minutes and seems to have no side effects.
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The team conducted a small, double-blind trial of the device—which they say is portable and could someday be available at pharmacies or even be applied directly from a smartphone—in which they invited 10 men and 10 women to wear a cap fitted with electrodes on their heads as they underwent one of the two types of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive and painless treatment that uses weak, direct electrical currents to stimulate the brain.

In the study, participants underwent tDCS for about 10 minutes before taking part in a motion sickness simulation, in which the men and women sat in a chair that rotated and tilted at different speeds. Neither the participants nor the technicians delivering the treatment knew if the tDCS being administered was cathodal stimulation, which dampens the inner ear signals, or anodal stimulation, which does not. The men and women taking part in the small study were randomly assigned to receive one of the two. According to the authors, those receiving the correct treatment were less likely to feel nauseous afterward, and also recovered more quickly.

Adolfo Bronstein, MD, PhD, FRCP, FAAN, a professor of clinical neuro-otology and a consultant neurologist at Imperial College London, and a co-author of the research, notes that this is just the first study the group has conducted with this device, and was “only laboratory-based.”

The authors expressed confidence that the device could be a very useful tool for individuals suffering from motion sickness on short trips in cars as well as longer journeys on boats, for instance, in the years to come. But, at least for now, Bronstein says that “general practitioners should not change their approach [to treating motion sickness] until field-based studies, e.g., in boats or cars, are carried out.”

—Mark McGraw

Reference

Arshad Q, Cerchiai N, et al. Electrocortical therapy for motion sickness. Neurology. 2015.