Brain stimulation acts ‘like a switch’ to turn off severe depression for one patient
Maggie Fox on CNN, Oct 2021
(from the CNN article)-
After years of suffering, a patient with severe and untreatable depression has finally found relief with an experimental brain implant originally developed to help people with epilepsy, researchers in California reported Monday.
It’s only a single patient, but the team at the University of California San Francisco says it has seen remarkable results with the device, which is calibrated to detect the signals associated with depressive symptoms in the patient’s brain, and interfere with them.
“When we turned this treatment on, our patient’s depression symptoms dissolved and in a remarkably small time she went into remission,” Dr. Katherine Scangos, a psychiatrist and neuroscience specialist at UCSF who led the study team, told reporters, “It was like a switch.”
One year later the patient, who is identified only as Sarah, says the device has banished her depression with no side-effects. “I had exhausted all possible treatment options with no success at lifting the depression that had descended five years earlier,” Sarah told reporters.
“My daily life had become so restricted and impoverished by depression that I felt tortured by each day and forced myself to resist the suicidal impulses that overtook me several times an hour. When I first received stimulation, I felt the most intensely joyous sensation,” she added.
“And my depression was a distant nightmare for a moment.”
(article continues…)
Digging Deeper
‘Personalized’ Brain Zaps May Ease Tough-to-Treat Depression, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Library, Oct 2021
Woman successfully treated for depression with electrical brain implant, Hannah Devlin in The Guardian, Oct 2021
More on Depression from the National Institute of Mental Health
