Of all the persistent mental health disorders, depression is one of the most severe and frightening.
The condition can affect all aspects of life and sometimes forms without any distinct triggers, giving patients little warning.
Depression can also be particularly difficult to treat, with around a third of patients presenting as treatment resistant.
Sometimes, even individuals who previously found success with medication or therapy eventually become resistant to traditional treatment options.
However, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) might have found a breakthrough new solution.
The team’s goal was to record the effects of deep brain stimulation on treatment-resistant depression via the implantation of a small device.
Novel stimulation method yielded big results for the patient
Instead of using deep brain stimulation at set intervals, the team at UCSF tracked the biomarker tied to the patient’s depression.
Whenever brainwaves in a certain pattern appeared, the device would begin to stimulate.
More specifically, the research team placed two electrodes in the patient’s brain.
One was placed at their ‘depression circuit’ and the other was placed at the aforementioned biomarker.
When the first electrode picked up biomarker activity, the second electrode was activated and began stimulating the depression circuit with small amounts of electricity.
This study is not the first time that deep brain stimulation was used as a treatment option, but it is the most successful to date.
The researchers attributed this success to the way that the stimulation was triggered, which is fairly novel.
It is worth noting that the targeted biomarker is likely not universal, which means that the researchers might need to find a similar one for other patients.
The treatment will probably need to be customised to fit each participant’s brain, in other words, providing tailored solutions to unique biology.
Andrew Krystal, a psychiatry researcher with the team, said that the “precision-medicine approach” is just another step in recognizing that mental health treatment needs to be customised to individual patients rather than seen as a one-size-fits-all approach.
As for the patient, they have experienced a significant lessening in symptoms that has been consistent in the months since the electrodes were implanted.
They also discovered that while the treatment did not technically ‘cure’ their depression, it was an effective addition to self-care and traditional therapy.
The research team plans to continue perfecting their implants with additional patients and individualised biomarker tracking.
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