Posted on 05/24/2023 7:36:12 AM PDT by Red Badger
Stanford researchers have discovered that certain brain signals actually flow the wrong way in people with treatment-resistant depression — and that magnets can correct the misdirection and help patients feel better.
“This is the first time in psychiatry where this particular change in a biology — the flow of signals between these two brain regions — predicts the change in clinical symptoms,” said Nolan Williams, senior author of a paper detailing the discovery.
The challenge: While most people living with depression can find some relief with medications, approximately 84 million people globally have treatment-resistant depression, meaning they still don’t feel better even after trying multiple antidepressants.
But about 50% of people with treatment-resistant depression do respond to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), according to Adam P. Stern, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with the new study. TMS uses magnetic fields to painlessly and noninvasively stimulate nerve cells in the brain, usually for 20-50 minutes a day, five days a week, for several weeks or even months.
This has been a life-changing discovery for many people with stubborn depression, but exactly how it works has remained a mystery. That’s made it hard to know which patients are likely to benefit from TMS before they commit to the treatment.
“The leading hypothesis has been that TMS could change the flow of neural activity in the brain,” said Anish Mitra, lead author of the new paper. “But to be honest, I was pretty skeptical.”
What’s new? To test his skepticism, Mitra and his colleagues recruited 33 people with treatment-resistant depression for the study, published in PNAS.
Twenty-three of the participants underwent an accelerated, highly effective version of TMS — known as “Stanford neuromodulation therapy” — that consists of 10 sessions per day for five days. The others received a sham treatment.
All of the participants’ had their brain activity mapped using fMRI before and after the treatment phase of the study. Data was also collected on 85 people without depression.
In 75% of the people with depression, some of the signals flowed the opposite way.
The results: When they analyzed the fMRI data, something stood out: a connection between a brain region that regulates physical sensations (the anterior insula) and a region that governs emotions (the anterior cingulate cortex).
As expected, in the brains of people without depression, signals traveled from the physical sensation area to the emotional area.
“You could think of it as the anterior cingulate cortex receiving this information about the body — like heart rate or temperature — and then deciding how to feel on the basis of all these signals,” explained Mitra.
Within 3 days of finishing the TMS treatment, the reversed signals were flowing in the right direction.
In 75% of the people with depression, however, some of the signals flowed the opposite way, and the more severe a person’s depression, the greater the proportion of wrong-way signals.
“It’s almost as if you’d already decided how you were going to feel, and then everything you were sensing was filtered through that,” said Mitra. “The mood has become primary.”
Within 3 days of finishing the TMS treatment, the reversed signals were flowing in the right direction, and patients were reporting an improvement in their mood — the more severe their depression was to begin with, the greater the reported improvement.
The bottom line: Not everyone with treatment-resistant depression displayed the wrong-way signals, but this finding may turn out to be a useful indicator that a person has depression and is likely to respond to TMS.
“Behavioral conditions like depression have been difficult to capture with imaging because, unlike an obvious brain lesion, they deal with the subtlety of relationships between various parts of the brain,” said senior author Mark Raichle.
“It’s incredibly promising that the technology now is approaching the complexity of the problems we’re trying to understand,” he continued.
Hope this guy never needs to go in for an MRI.
???
I thought we were talking about science.
;'}
If that guy goes for an MRI, it will take either an hour, or a few milliseconds, to get all that crap out of his face.
Yep, one way or the other, it’s coming off.
I met a cashier at Walmart a couple of years back that had red dots all over her face just like that.
I asked her if she had the measles.
She said, “No, that’s where I had piercings removed.”
She was a pretty girl otherwise that had ruined her face with that crap. Those scars will never go away..............
We’ve seen this before. Just another scam from a pseudoscience that created homeless wrecks and mass shooters.
That wasn’t said by W. C. Fields, but by a guy named Carlton W. Berenda, in 1965.
Captain Amazing strapped into a degausser/Psycho-frakulator
„I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.“ — Tom Waits American singer-songwriter and actor (1949 - )
„I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.“ — Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
It has been used in movies and TV shows for decades. It is called a ‘spoonerism’. There are books with that as the title and songs using it as well..............
It has been falsely attributed to Fields, Parker, Waits, and others. Some may have said it at one time or another, but Berenda originated it.
“You can prick your finger, but don’t finger your.......” - George Carlin
You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose..................
“In the old days they called this a lobotomy.”
I guess I go back further. I thought it was closer to shock treatments.
wy69
In my youth I knew a neighbor lady who had severe depression. Nothing worked until she was sent in for Electric Shock treatment. That did the trick.
I know it is considered barbaric now but it did work.
“to the field strength of an MRI machine”
It has always amazed me that our signals to/from the brain via our nerves are not affected by a magnetic field. A magnetic field induces a current in a conductor. Someone else mentioned how a magnet can alter the direction of a CRT beam.
When I put a magnet next to my finger, why doesn’t it make my finger move or create some sort of sensation?
This depression treatment mystifies me.
A CHANGING magnetic field induces a current in a conductor. The study of magnetohydrodynamics shows that this is true even in the case of a liquid conductor.
When I put a magnet next to my finger, why doesn’t it make my finger move or create some sort of sensation?
The change in magnetic field due to moving that magnet doesn't generate enough current in your nerves to do anything. I'v had an MRI scan once, and didn't feel anything in that much stronger and more rapidly changing magnetic field
Bet it wasn’t as big as the Navy’s degausser...big enough for 600 foot vessels...don’t think there was ever an issue with the crew’s minds being wiped. At least I don’t recall....
First time I heard that phrase was from Tom T-bone Stankus...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMzV2VNN2sg
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