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In just one year, almost 3 million U.S. teens suffered a major bout of depression, a new government report shows.
“Adolescence is a critical time in a person’s development, and battling with depression can be devastating for teens unless they receive effective treatment,” said Paolo del Vecchio, director of the Center for Mental Health Services at the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
Brain stimulation often is used for treatment-resistant depression when medications and psychotherapy are not enough to elicit a meaningful response. It is both old and new again: electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) has been used for decades, while emerging technologies, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), are gaining acceptance.
The underlying premise of neuromodulation is that the brain is an electrochemical organ that can be modulated by pharmacotherapy or device-based approaches, or their combination. ECT is the prototypic device-based neuromodulation approach, and remains one of the most effective treatments for severe depression.
First, researchers are struggling to understand why white individuals, in particular, are doing so poorly with drug abuse. Although there are no definite answers, many speculate that this cohort of patients suffers, in addition to social and economic isolation, from acute job loss. It is known that poverty, stress, and lack of social support are independent risk factors for opioid abuse. Similarly, job loss per se has been found to increase the risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and death. Of note, recession alone does not increase CVD mortality; however, when recession is associated with job loss, heart attacks, strokes, and deaths rise. This suggests that increases in stress, despair, and possibly time spent engaging in related unhealthy behaviors often seen with financial insecurity (eg, physical inactivity, smoking, drinking, and drug abuse) may be culprits.
A 9-week study of 16 obese patients who received repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) or a sham treatment suggests that TMS may help obese patients reduce cravings and shed pounds — but these are very early days, and the findings needs to be replicated in much longer, larger studies to confirm safety and efficacy, researchers caution.
Antidepressant medication, often SSRIs like Prozac or Zoloft, and cognitive-behavioral therapy relieve depression in many patients, but not all of them. So wouldn’t it be a big step forward to find an additional kind of treatment that might benefit others? One answer might be TMS, or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, available only for the past few years.
MagVenture’s depression treatment – the MagVita TMS Therapy®- is CE approved for “treatment of Major Depressive Disorder in adult patients who have failed to achieve satisfactory improvement from two prior antidepressant medications, at or above the minimal effective dose and duration in the current episode”.
A growing body of evidence suggests maintenance TMS is an effective strategy for preventing relapse in patients with treatment-resistant depression.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an established, noninvasive, and nonconvulsive neuromodulation technique initially developed in the mid-1980s as a tool to study human neurophysiology (1). Since that time, several diagnostic and therapeutic clinical applications for TMS have been developed that are part of the standard of care in neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry clinics around the world.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was developed approximately 30 years ago by Anthony Barker. TMS has been applied as both a method to evaluate several neurophysiological processes and as a treatment for resistant psychiatric and neurological disorders. As a treatment, repetitive TMS (rTMS) has extensive evidence for efficacy in mood disorders through the modulation of cortical excitability, inhibition and plasticity. In recent years, several studies have also explored the utility of rTMS as a treatment tool in schizophrenia with promising results.
