Scientists from the University of California at San Francisco have successfully treated a woman with severe depression by using deep brain stimulation with an implanted implant. While this is an isolated case, scientists believe that in the future, such a method may become promising for the treatment of severe depression and other mental illnesses.
According to the World Health Organization, about 280 million people suffer from severe forms of depression. Many were still considered incurable or intractable: 10% to 30% of cases of depression cannot be cured with at least two different drugs. However, these people now have hope.
Created by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the implant detects certain brain patterns that scientists believe are associated with the development of depression, and interrupts them with weak impulses of electric current. The research results were published in October in the scientific journal Nature Medicine.
As the patient herself, 36-year-old Sarah, said, the treatment returned her “a life that deserves to live.” Prior to that, she had five years of unsuccessfully struggling with severe depression. “The first time I was given such stimulation, I felt the strongest joy, and my depression for a moment seemed like a distant nightmare. I just laughed out loud. It was the first time in five years that I suddenly laughed or smiled, ”says Sarah.
A similar method, deep brain stimulation, has been used for over two decades in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy, but attempts to use it in the treatment of depression have previously failed.
The main difficulty was finding the so-called zone of depression – specific areas and patterns in the brain that are responsible for the onset of this state.
The fact is that in the case of depression, various interconnected parts of the brain are usually involved, and they may differ from person to person.
Here’s how the treatment process went: First, the researchers placed a temporary implant in the patient’s brain for a week, which simply read a wide range of brain activity patterns, while the patient kept notes of her mood changes. After that, a machine learning algorithm studied this data and helped to correlate specific patterns of neural activity in the amygdala with the worst periods in Sarah’s mood. Researchers tried to stimulate the same area with electrical stimulation, but this did not help. Through trial and error, scientists were able to identify another area of the brain – the anterior part of the so-called striatum – the impact on which, with the help of weak electrical stimulation pulses, had a positive effect on the patient’s condition.
In the second phase of the study, the scientists installed a permanent electrical implant with a tiny battery in the patient’s brain. He detected activity in the amygdala associated with depression, and automatically affected the desired areas of the striatum with electrical stimulation. This happened about 300 times a day and lasted for a total of about 30 minutes a day.
According to Sarah, these moments were accompanied by a slight increase in concentration and positive emotions.
To date, she has lived with the implant for over a year.
So far, the method has been tested on only one patient. Now scientists have found two more volunteers who will participate in the development of the new method, a total of 12 patients should participate in the study. Scientists admit that the method is still far from widespread use, and in the future it will only be suitable for patients with severe forms of mental illness.
Among other things, this is an expensive method: the device itself costs about $ 35 thousand.
The complexity of its application, in particular, lies in the fact that in the case of each patient it will be necessary to individually search for those parts of the brain that need to be influenced.
Nonetheless, this is a big breakthrough: for the first time, it has been demonstrated that the patterns of the brain that are responsible for the development of mental illness can be detected, and then the corresponding areas of the brain can be targeted. “Previously in psychiatry, we were not able to provide this kind of personalized treatment. This success in itself is an incredible advance in our knowledge of the brain functions that underlie mental illness, ”says Catherine Skangos, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at UCSF, who led the study. In her opinion, “the idea that we can treat symptoms the moment they occur is a whole new way of dealing with the most difficult cases of depression to treat.”
“This is an impressive step forward due to the individual nature of the stimulation,” says neurophysiologist and professor at University College London, Jonathan Roiser. apparently differ from person to person. “
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