For more than three decades his life had been marked by a depression so resistant not to respond to any treatment. Drugs, psychotherapy, other forms of intervention, numerous hospitalizations: nothing had managed to scratch that wall of pain that had led him three times to try suicide. Until a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota has decided to experiment with this patient, whose story is described in This study pre-print and on New Scientist, a radically different approach.
The patient was in fact subjected to a brain system that has made it possible to stimulate the areas involved in its condition in a targeted way. The big news was not only technology but personalization: scholars have in fact every electrical impulse on the basis of the patient’s daily reactions is calibratedgradually adjusting the settings.
In fact, treatments resistant depression is a common form of greater depressive disorder that does not improve after at least two standard attempts, such as drugs or psychotherapy. In these cases, Acts are often used, electroconvulsant therapy, a medical treatment in which short electrical impulses are sent to the brain under anesthesia to induce a short convulsive crisis that uses weak electrical currents to stimulate the brain. Although effective in some patients, it doesn’t work for everyone.
The man in question had even already tried three cycles of ECT: the first with partial benefits, the subsequent ones without any effect. The limit, the researchers explain, is that the ECT is based on one Standard brain map And it does not take into account individual differences, thus ending up applying an equal approach to everyone who often does not affect the truly involved areas.
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The result was surprising. Already in the early hours after stimulation, the man began to feel emotions that you haven’t felt for decades. For example, he cried, but not of sadness: they were tears of happiness. With the passing of the weeks, The suicidal thoughts that tormented him for years have attenuated until they disappear. After six months the symptoms were significantly reduced and, within nine months, the doctors were able to talk about Complete remission.
The researchers had first of all used functional magnetic resonance imaging for map the brain areas related to depressiondiscovering that the patient’s salience network, responsible for the elaboration of external stimuli, was about four times bigger than that of people without a disturbance. Subsequently they surgically implanted four groups of electrodes along the boundaries of these networks and, a few days later, they started sending electrical signals to each of them separately.
Since then two years have passed – the study, whose first author is Aunta Nahas, was published in early August – and numerous stimulation patterns, first very frequent then more distant over time, and its new condition would seem to have remained stable. The man said he had rediscovered simple and precious moments, like a car trip with the family in which, for the first time after a long time, he managed to feel really peaceful and present.
This technique, baptized PEACEis not naturally still available on a large scale: so far it has been tested only in this caseeven if other patients have already been involved in new experiments. For researchers, the goal is to demonstrate that it is not an isolated event but an approach capable of opening concrete possibilities For those suffering from severe and chronic depression. “The uniqueness of peace lies in combining a very precise and personalized intervention on multiple brain networks, regulating the parameters so that the patient can get the maximum benefit,” explained the first author.
If the research confirms the results, it could therefore be one of the most important innovations of the last few years in the care of mental health, returning hope to those who, so far, had never had alternatives.
Scientific sources mentioned in this article:
Personalized Adaptive Cortical Electro-Stimulation (Pace) in Treatment-Vestant Depression
Source: Vanity Fair
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