Why Electrical Ear Clip VNS May Not Live Up to the Hype...

Tracing the origins of where ear VNS may have actually come from, seems accupuncture (needles) in the ear to stimulate the Vagus Nerve on a small trial of 18 patients - in Russia mind you - saw some potential autonomic improvements.

Dr. Kevin Tracey regrets Vagus Nerve Stimulation being so widely used by the now "Ear Clip" based companies pushing the interventions.

And myself, having as well experimented with taVNS, it really never did much for me, and many are highly unlikely to even be sticking the required needles in their ears and clipping electrodes to the needles...

I will say, while in China (just 2 months before the pandemic shut down everything) I had been working on a in-ear Ultrasound VNS system, and that actually *did* substantially work.

I know what Vagus Nerve Stimulation feels like, having had the luxury of Ph.D. advisors guiding placement, advising neurostim work, and the privilege to handle very expensive lab-grade Ultrasound targeting machines on the Cervical Neck Vagus Nerve Stimulation with Ultrasound, it's very obvious when you get it, and it's unlike what most people think its like.

Anyways, here's his tweet, decide for yourself :D

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Dr. Kevin Tracey Wrote on X:

#vagusnerve has ~200 million views on TikTok.

There are 176 trials of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) registered on http://ClinicalTrials.gov. There are dozens of ear stimulators being promoted everywhere you look. Where did it all this come from in the modern era?

In 2001, in the city of Tomsk, in Western Siberia, Russia, eighteen patients with coronary artery disease had acupuncture needles inserted 0.1 to 0.3 mm deep near the auditory passage of the ear, near where the auricular branch of the vagus nerve originates.

Low-frequency impulse current, 15 minutes daily for 10 consecutive days, decreased heart rate from 76 to 63 beats per minute and blood pressure from 130/80 to 120/75 mmHg.

An industry born, (even though no one has directly replicated this, small, open label, original pilot study). And I wish they HAD NOT called it "VNS," but "trans-auricular nerve stimulation" or TANS or something else instead. The available evidence from countless small studies is insufficient to support any conclusion about selectivity, because there are many nerves in the ear. Prior and ongoing techniques electrical ear stimulators are neither specific or selective to the vagus nerve.

"Vagal neurostimulation in patients with coronary artery disease," Zamotrinsky et al., Autonomic Neuroscience, 2001."

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