The effect of direct current stimulation in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on working memory in veterans and disabled athletes

Working memory is the most basic pillar of memory for doing cognitive tasks. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on working memory in veterans and disabled athletes.   The method of this study was semi-experimental. 24 veterans and disabled of Shiraz athletes participated in this study in an available sampling. After the pre-test, the participants were randomly divided into real stimulation and sham groups. In the real stimulation group, anodal electrode was on the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and cathode electrode in the FP1. The location of the electrodes in the sham group was the same as the real stimulation group, but the stimulation was interrupted after 30 seconds. The stimulation rate was 2 mA for 15 minutes, which was performed during three sessions with an interval of 48 hours per session. Data analysis was performed using ANCOVA test in SPSS version 22.   The results showed that there was a significant difference between the real stimulation group and the sham at the working memory (P = 0.0001). The results of Bonferroni post-hoc test showed that the performance of the real stimulation was better than the sham group (P = 0.0001).   It can be said that anodal tDCS in the DLPFC region with 2 mA excitation can improve working memory in veterans and disabled athletes.