Breakthrough procedure ‘can eliminate severe depression in just three days’

A LANDMARK procedure using magnetic stimulation can eliminate severe depression in an average of just three days, suggests a study.

And the treatment works in nine out of 10 patients.

The new form of magnetic stimulation pinpoints a part of the brain which is overactive in people who are depressed.

Stanford University researchers recorded a 35 per cent increase in effectiveness compared to previous techniques after they fired more than triple the amount of pulses at the brain.

Before the therapy all 21 study participants had experienced suicidal thoughts and were tested as severely depressed.

Afterward, no participants reported having further suicidal thoughts and 19 of them scored as “nondepressed” on tests.

Senior author Dr Nolan Williams, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, said: “There’s never been a therapy for treatment-resistant depression that’s broken 55% remission rates in openlabel testing. Electroconvulsive therapy is thought to be the gold standard, but it has only an average 48% remission rate in treatmentresistant depression. No-one expected these kinds of results.”

The treatment, called Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy, or SAINT, is a form of transcranial magnetic stimulation, approved by the US’S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating depression.

Its designers say the therapy improves on other similar treatments by increasing the number of magnetic pulses, speeding up the pace of the treatment and targeting the pulses according to each individual’s neurocircuitry.

Before the therapy, none of the participants’ depression had improved with medications, or electroconvulsive therapy, in which seizures are electrically induced in patients’ brains.

In traditional transcranial magnetic stimulation, electric currents from a magnetic coil placed on the scalp excite a region of the brain implicated in depression. The treatment, as approved by the FDA, requires six weeks of once-daily sessions.

But only about half of patients who undergo this treatment improve, and only about one-third experience remission from depression. The Stanford researchers tweaked the conventional method according to evidence in other studies in a bid to improve its effectiveness.

One such study had suggested that a stronger dose of 1,800 pulses per session, instead of 600, would boost effectiveness.

Medics had used a similar dosage safely on Parkinson’s disease patients, so the researchers estimated it would also be safe for treating depression. Other studies suggested accelerating the treatment would help relieve patients’ depression more rapidly. The researchers targeted the stimulation more precisely, which they thought might also improve the results.