Depression treated successfully with on-demand brain stimulation

The team said the breakthrough is ‘a landmark success’ in applying advances in neuroscience to the treatment of psychiatric disorders. Their research is published in Nature Medicine.

“This study points the way to a new paradigm that is desperately needed in psychiatry,” said Andrew Krystal, PhD, professor of psychiatry and member of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “We’ve developed a precision-medicine approach that has successfully managed our patient’s treatment-resistant depression by identifying and modulating the circuit in her brain that’s uniquely associated with her symptoms.”

Previous clinical trials have shown limited success for treating depression with traditional deep brain stimulation (DBS), in part because most devices can only deliver constant electrical stimulation and usually only in one area of the brain. A major challenge for the field is that depression may involve different brain areas in different people.