Implanted device stimulates patient's brain, treats severe depression, researchers find
Fox News
A woman with severe depression saw near-immediate relief when treated with a surgically implanted device to stimulate the neural circuit causing the illness, researchers at the University of California San Francisco announced Monday.
"This study points the way to a new paradigm that is desperately needed in psychiatry," Andrew Krystal, PhD, professor of psychiatry and member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, said in a statement. "We’ve developed a precision-medicine approach that has successfully managed our patient’s treatment-resistant depression by identifying and modulating the circuit in her brain that’s uniquely associated with her symptoms."
Researchers said that prior clinical trials on DBS only indicated limited success in treating depression because most devices offer constant electrical stimulation, usually in one area of the brain, whereas depression may affect different areas of the brain for different people. This time, the early findings were deemed successful because researchers discovered a neural biomarker, described as "a specific pattern of brain activity that indicates the onset of symptoms," and then customized the device to respond only upon detection of that pattern.
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