Scientists Treat Chronic Depression with Brain Implant

Varieties

October 7th, 5:26am

London - Asharq Al-Awsat

The human brain. illustration: AFP

Neuroscience has recently seen a new stunning advance that gives hope to those with mental illness not helped with drugs. Doctors have successfully treated a woman with severe depression with an experimental brain implant in a "stunning" advance that offers hope to those with intractable mental illness, according to The Guardian. The device works by detecting patterns of brain activity linked to depression and automatically interrupting them using tiny pulses of electrical stimulation delivered deep inside the brain. The 36-year-old patient, Sarah, said the therapy had returned her to "a life worth living", allowing her to laugh spontaneously for the first time in five years. Although the therapy has been tested in only one patient – and would only ever be suitable for those with severe illness – the success is seen as hugely significant. It is the first demonstration that the brain activity underlying the symptoms of mental illness can be reliably detected and reveals that these brain circuits can be nudged back into a healthy state, even in a patient who has been unwell for years. "We haven't been able to do this kind of personalized therapy previously in psychiatry. This success in itself is an incredible advancement in our knowledge of the brain function that underlies mental illness," said Katherine Scangos, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who led the work. Prof Rupert McShane, a consultant psychiatrist and associate professor at Oxford University, who was not involved in the trial, said: "This is a stunning demonstration which points to a way of examining the biology of the abrupt slumps into despair that can be so destructive." Between 10 percent and 30 percent of people with depression do not respond to at least two drug treatments – equivalent to about 2.7 million people in the UK.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3231466/scientists-treat-chronic-depression-brain-implant