“For those of us who want to use neuromodulation, one of the main obstacles we face is how burdensome it is for our patients,” said Roy Hamilton, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study.*

The stimulation treatment has been shown to work with other ailments, such as depression and ADHD. It works by pulsing the brain with a low-grade electrical current—roughly equivalent to a nine-volt battery—to encourage neurons to fire. Because the voltage is so low, there’s no pain.

“You might feel a sensation of a skin burning and tingling, or some people experience it more as itching,” Charvet said. “You acclimate to that.”

Afterward, some MS patients report feeling less tired, and more clear, active, and energetic. Charvet’s results are provisional because of the small sample size. But the study, slated to be published in Neuromodulation: Technology at the Neural Interface this month, is promising. It involved 25 MS patients like Bennett who played computer games meant to boost cognition while receiving the tDCS. Meanwhile, 20 played the computer games alone. After 10 sessions, the tDCS group had greater improvements in cognition than the people who only played the games. In another experiment, which Charvet will present in April at the American Academy of Neurology meeting, the tDCS sessions also improved mood and reduced fatigue.

Charvet conducted the study with Marom Bikson, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the City University of New York, who runs a company that designs tDCS devices. Though tinkerers have tried to rig up their own tDCS systems at home, zapping themselves at will, Charvet said there was little risk of that here since the device would only work if placed and unlocked properly.

For Bennett, the biggest hassle was “getting on the head gear. It was a pain in the butt till I got the hang of it,” she said. She would feel a mild tingling from the device while she worked on computer games that involved clicking on spots and adding up numbers. After 20 minutes, she was done.

“It definitely decreased my fatigue,” Bennett said. “As the days went along I got much more spry.” She thinks the effect lasted about two weeks afterward.

Larry Irving, a 51-year-old financial executive, used the tDCS procedure to help with his MS-induced memory and problem-solving impairments. “One of the problems I had was, in my field of finance, I was very good with numbers,” he said. But lately, “I had problems with numbers, recalling things that were important for a person in my position.”

After the treatment, “using numbers again, I felt relaxed and comfortable,” Irving said.

Hamilton praised the study for showing how tDCS could be used in a home environment, but cautioned that the ability of subjects to determine whether or not they were getting tDCS might have influenced their view of the therapy.