eLECTROCEUTICAl

DEFINITION OF ELECTROCEUTICAL

Electroceutical is a term coined recently that appeared for the first time in an article in the Scientific Journal “Nature” in  2013. It basically encompasses all bioelectronic medicine that uses electrical stimulation to influence and modify the functions of the human body, by administering electrical impulses directed to specific nerve fibers or to particular cerebral circuits, which allow the treatment of various types of pathologies through the autogenous production of neurotransmitters.

The nervous system supervises all the functions of the body, sending orders through electrical impulses. When these impulses do not work properly, they can be corrected from the outside using FisioFrems ™ artificial electrostimulation.

ELECTROCEUTICAL STIMULATION AND TISSUES

Communication between cells occurs thanks to a system based on the transduction of electrical signals and biochemical events triggered by the passage of ions through the channels of the cell membrane.

Each cell is characterized by a resting membrane potential, i.e. a difference in electrical potential between the intracellular and extracellular environment, due to the different ionic concentration of the two compartments.

Rapid variations of the membrane potential, which passes from the normal negative value to a positive value and then returns to the initial value, constitute the action potentials, fundamental elements as, for example, they allow the transmission of information between the cells of the nervous system. Cells capable of producing such depolarization events in a relatively short time and in the presence of a stimulus that exceeds a certain threshold, are called “excitable”. Tissues formed by excitable cells are in turn excitable tissues (eg striated muscles, smooth muscles, myocardium, nervous tissue etc…). The action potential is followed by a period during which the cell does not excite, called the refractory period; there is therefore a maximum frequency of “useful” stimuli, characteristic of each tissue. Another fundamental property of all excitable tissues is adaptation: the reiteration of a stimulus induces a variation in the response threshold.

The disease destabilizes the balance of a tissue and is accompanied by the variation in the excitability of nerve cells and other cell types, variously interconnected, such as muscle or glandular cells, connective tissue, etc.

Since electrical stimulation acts directly on the transmembrane ion channel system, it can induce functional modifications of any excitable cell / tissue system by modulating its response threshold, thereby restoring correct functioning. In general, electrical stimulation can be of two distinct types:

• energetic, that causes a transfer of electrical energy to the tissues in order to cause topical physical effects such as heating or muscle contraction;

• informative, the electrical disturbance administered through stimulation is received by the biological tissues as information.

FREMS technology falls into this second category, electrical stimulation of an informative type.