2.1. Study Design
post-stroke depression
RECRUITMENT
Recruitment occurred at the rehabilitation medical center of Shanxi Medical University’s First Hospital between 2 January 2022 and 28 August 2022. Potential participants who were screened by clinical research physicians were scheduled for an on-site consent meeting with a clinical researcher. Participants received no financial compensation in this study. We designed a randomized, double-blind (blinded participants and raters), sham-controlled research trial to determine the efficacy of rTMS stimulation in conjunction with MBSR. The assignment of participants to treatment and sham/control groups was random. Randomization was performed using Visual Binning in IBM SPSS Statistics v.26 software:Group A: real rTMS stimulation and MBSR (rTMS–MBSR);Group B: sham rTMS stimulation and MBSR (sham rTMS–MBSR);Group C: sham rTMS stimulation and general psychological care.This experiment was conducted on 72 patients with mild to moderate post-stroke depression admitted at the medical rehabilitation center of Shanxi Medical University’s First Hospital in China. One patient in group A dropped out of the study due to unwillingness to cooperate with the questionnaire. A total of 71 participants were included in the study. 