How Deep Brain Stimulation Can Help With Severe Depression
Itcan be challenging to create a treatment plan for depression. This is especially true for patients who aren’t responding to conventional treatments and are undergoing experimental therapies such as deep brain stimulation. For most medical conditions, doctors can directly measure the part of the body that is being treated, such as blood pressure for cardiovascular disease. These measurable changes serve as an objective biomarker of recovery that provides valuable information about how to care for these patients. Each reason may indicate a different course of action, such as altering a medication, addressing an issue in psychotherapy or increasing the intensity of brain stimulation treatment.We are neuroengineers. In our study, newly published in Nature, we identified potential biomarkers for deep brain stimulation that could one day help guide clinicians and patients when making treatment decisions for those using this approach to alleviate treatment-resistant depression.Clinical depression does not respond to available therapies in a significant number of patients. Researchers have been working to find alternative options for those with treatment-resistant depression, and many decades of experiments have identified specific brain networks with abnormal electrical activity in those with depression. This notion of depression as abnormal brain activity rather than a chemical imbalance led to the development of deep brain stimulation as a depression treatment: a surgically implanted, pacemaker-like device that delivers electrical impulses to certain areas of the brain. Studies testing this technique have found that it can decrease depression severity over time in most patients.
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