Powerful magnetic pulses applied to the scalp to stimulate the brain can bring fast relief to many severely depressed patients for whom standard treatments have failed. Yet it’s been a mystery exactly how transcranial magnetic stimulation, as the treatment is known, changes the brain to dissipate depression. Now, research led by Stanford Medicine scientists has found that the treatment works by reversing the direction of abnormal brain signals.
The findings also suggest that backward streams of neural activity between key areas of the brain could be used as a biomarker to help diagnose depression.
“The leading hypothesis has been that TMS could change the flow of neural activity in the brain,” said Anish Mitra, MD, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “But to be honest, I was pretty skeptical. I wanted to test it.”
Mitra had just the tool to do it. As a graduate student at Washington University in Saint Louis, in the lab of Mark Raichle, MD, he developed a mathematical tool to analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI — commonly used to locate active areas in the brain. The new analysis used minute differences in timing between the activation of different areas to also reveal the direction of that activity.
In the new study, published May 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mitra and Raichle teamed up with Nolan Williams, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, whose team has advanced the use of magneticstimulation, personalized to each patient’s brain anatomy, to treat profound depression. The FDA-cleared treatment, known as Stanford neuromodulation therapy, incorporates advanced imaging technologies to guide stimulation with high-dose patterns of magnetic pulses that can modify brain activity related to major depression. Compared with traditional TMS, which requires daily sessions over several weeks or months, SNT works on an accelerated timeline of 10 sessions each day for just five days.
“This was the perfect test to see if TMS has the ability to change the way that signals flow through the brain,” said Mitra, who is lead author of the study. “If this doesn’t do it, nothing will.”
Raichle and Williams are senior authors of the study.
pjurplejah on May 16th, 2023 at 15:08 UTC »
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
ilikebeer19 on May 16th, 2023 at 13:44 UTC »
How soon until I can order my happy brain magnets on Amazon?
roqueofspades on May 16th, 2023 at 13:29 UTC »
I've had TMS twice--the first time, it was the only thing that ever improved my condition, the second time, it didn't work and was painful. (I tried to tell the technician many times that they were clearly doing it wrong but even though they kept recalibrating they couldn't get it right.) This is all to say, the technology is promising but it has a long way to go to be refined, and I really hope science continues along this path because you can only try so many antidepressants that make you deathly ill before you start feeling like giving up.