Читать книгу The Future of Health - Roberto Ascione - Страница 14

Thync is a small device aimed at reducing anxiety and ensuring a pleasant sleep. It rests on the neck and is managed via a smartphone app, giving users a choice between one of two programs. In the United States, much importance is given to the dangers of stress. According to studies of the American Psychological Association, it is in our times that the highest number of anxious states has been recorded in the history of the American population. Thync was developed by a team of neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and it went through five years of trials and thousands of test sessions. The instrument uses electrostimulation to alter the state of the brain and help the users relieve stress and anxiety without necessarily resorting to the use of anxiolytic drugs. The triangular device should be placed on the neck, at the back of the head, or on the forehead, and then activated: Thync, through small electric discharges, interacts with the nervous system, helping the wearer to recover his or her psychophysical balance for an improvement in health. “Neurostimulation is based on the link between the nerves located in the back of the neck and two areas of the brain, which affect stress and sleep” explains Isy Goldwasser, CEO of the company. But researchers want to push Thync beyond the boundaries of its original purpose, toward even more ambitious goals. They began with the assumption that the scientific literature is increasingly highlighting the important role that the nervous system plays in regulating the immune response in diseases such as psoriasis, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and rheumatoid arthritis. This led, in 2017, to the first trial of Thync in the treatment of psoriasis.

In the blind study, 28 subjects followed a treatment program (or a placebo program) every day for 10 minutes over the course of four weeks. After this time, 15 of the 18 subjects in the treatment group (83 percent of the total) reported at least a 50 percent reduction in the symptoms of psoriasis while 6 out of 18 subjects showed a reduction of more than 75 percent of these symptoms. In comparison, only 2 out of 10 subjects in the control group with the placebo program showed a 50 percent reduction in symptoms and no one had improvement of 75 percent (p = 0.0005). Thync is currently conducting clinical trials to further validate noninvasive modulation as a treatment for plaque psoriasis.