Brain stimulation acts ‘like a switch’ to turn off severe depression for one patient. After years of suffering, a patient with severe and untreatable depression has finally found relief with an experimental brain implant originally developed to help people with epilepsy, researchers in California reported.
By Maggie Fox (https://edition.cnn.com/)
Link to full article here: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/04/health/depression-implant-treatment-wellness/index.html
It’s only a single patient, but the team at the University of California San Francisco says it has seen remarkable results with the device, which is calibrated to detect the signals associated with depressive symptoms in the patient’s brain, and interfere with them.
“When we turned this treatment on, our patient’s depression symptoms dissolved and in a remarkably small time she went into remission,” Dr. Katherine Scangos, a psychiatrist and neuroscience specialist at UCSF who led the study team, told reporters.
“It was like a switch.”
One year later the patient, who is identified only as Sarah, says the device has banished her depression with no side-effects.
