A systematic assessment of safety, tolerability and blinding effectiveness of kilohertz transcranial…

StudyJournal of neural engineering· Aug 2026

A systematic assessment of safety, tolerability and blinding effectiveness of kilohertz transcranial magnetic perturbation (kTMP).

Christina M Merrick, Guy Avraham, Philipp Reber … Ludovica Labruna

Neurostimulation & InterventionalStudyQ1IF 4.1

kTMP tolerability ratings stayed near-negligible and indistinguishable between active and sham stimulation

A systematic assessment of safety, tolerability and blinding effectiveness of kilohertz transcranial magnetic perturbation (kTMP).

Christina M Merrick … Ludovica Labruna

Journal of neural engineering · Aug 2026

Background

Non-invasive brain stimulation (non-invasive brain stimulation) techniques are increasingly used to modulate brain activity in basic and translational research.

Purpose

However, its safety and tolerability have not yet been systematically evaluated-a gap this study aims to address.

Methods

Approach: We conducted sham-controlled experiments, within-subject comparisons, and patient feasibility studies with kTMP, entailing 433 sessions across 143 individuals.

n = 143 individuals

below 1.5

Results

below 1.5

annoyance and pain stayed barely detectable, active felt no different from sham

n = 143 individuals

More results

No adverse events occurred across 433 sessions.

Permutation tests showed no significant active-sham differences and bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals consistently fell within the ±1 equivalence margin.

When auditory masking was used, participants could not distinguish active from sham stimulation.

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Conclusion · 1 of 2

Significance: kTMP achieves cortical E-fields an order of magnitude higher than conventional subthreshold tES while maintaining robust safety margins and tolerability indistinguishable from sham, supporting its use for rigorous double-blind studies and translational settings.

Conclusion · 2 of 2

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A systematic assessment of safety, tolerability and blinding effectiveness of kilohertz transcranial magnetic perturbation (kTMP).

A systematic assessment of safety, tolerability and blinding effectiveness of kilohertz transcranial magnetic perturbation (kTMP).

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