On the Benefits of Using an Electrode to Stimulate a Brain Vacuum in Patients with Gravestate Depressive Disorder

What works for one person can not always work for others. There are several drawbacks of the trial. For one thing, it’s a huge leap to conclude it’ll work for the millions who suffer from depression when you’ve just studied a few people. That is something the neuroscientists are aware of, though, and they do not ever intend to replicate the procedure on more than a couple of people. Rather, Sheth and his team are trying to find patterns they can use to make DBS more effective. Four more people with severe depression were implanted with electrodes, and they plan to study twelve more.

In general, one of the problems with treating depression “is that we’ve got a lot of medications that pretty much do the same thing,” Dr. Aaronson said. And when patients do not respond to those medications, “we don’t have a lot of novel stuff.”

Implanted vagus nerve stimulation isn’t currently accessible for most people, however, because insurers have so far declined to pay for the procedure, with the exception of Medicare recipients participating in the latest clinical trial.

In one pilot study at Emory, for example, researchers electronically stimulated the neck skin near the vagus in 16 people, eight of whom received vagus nerve stimulation treatment and eight of whom received a sham treatment. The researchers found that the stimulation treatment reduced inflammatory responses to stress and was associated with a decrease in PTSD symptoms, indicating that such stimulation may be useful for some patients, including those with elevated inflammatory biomarkers.

PTSD is characterized by increased measures of inflammation in the blood, he said, which “can influence circuits in the brain that are related to anxiety.”

Understanding the Brain: A Novel Method for Stimulating Depressive Processes in a New Study of the Cingulate Cortex

The story published by MIT Technology Review caught my attention because of that. A new method of measuring a person’s moods can be used to improve deep brain stimulation for depression. The research was recently presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting.

Unlike Parkinson’s, depression is something we still don’t fully understand from a purely neurological perspective. It’s difficult to figure out which brain regions are associated with depression, given there are so many symptoms, and thus a challenge to figure out what exactly to stimulate.

After analyzing the brain recordings of three of five volunteers, neuroscientists discovered that a region of the brain called the cingulate cortex fired one way when a patient was feeling better and the opposite way when they were feeling low. The volunteers’ pattern was the same.

It is a good step forward. Sheth and his team are looking to find trends that will help them improve their understanding of depression. And just as important, to me at least, their work moves us one step further to destigmatizing a condition many still believe is all “in one’s head” — which technically it is, but now there might just be a way for us to see it.

For another, as you can imagine, getting a hole drilled into your head, probing, and then sending electricity to various parts of your brain is, well, obviously very risky. It can cost over twenty thousand dollars, on an average.