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.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most common developmental disorder that is associated with environmental and genetic factors. Neurobiological evidence suggests that fronto-striatum-cerebellum circuit abnormalities, mainly in the right hemisphere, are responsible for most of the disturbed sensorimotor integration; dopamine seems to be the main neurochemical alteration underlying these morphological abnormalities.

NeuroStar transcranial magnetic stimulation showed efficacy as mono-therapy for treatment of postpartum-onset major depressive disorder in women, according to data presented at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting.

An astounding 5-6% of people who began using cocaine 24 hours ago will become long-term users, according to a paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. Addiction varies with each person’s individual brain chemistry, but the presence of dopamine in the brain is a highly rewarding feeling that most people will work to replicate.

Brain stimulation has been in use for decades as a potential treatment for psychiatric disorders. However, its use in addiction is relatively new. Promising clinical and preclinical data suggest it could have some positive effects, although to be effective the type of stimulation and the brain areas to be targeted have to be more deeply explored.

The naysayers told John Elder Robison, “You must be nuts! I would never do that, that’s crazy.”

That was the reaction, among some, to his participation in experimental brain therapy called TMS or transcranial magnetic stimulation. But after decades of feeling like a social misfit — misreading or missing other people’s emotions due to Asperger’s syndrome, diagnosed at age 40 — he was suddenly able to sense others’ feelings.