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"Powerful magnetic pulses applied to the scalp to stimulate the brain can bring fast relief to many severely depressed patients for whom standard treatments have failed. Yet it's been a mystery exactly how transcranial magnetic stimulation, as the treatment is known, changes the brain to dissipate depression. Now, research led by Stanford Medicine scientists has found that the treatment works by reversing the direction of abnormal brain signals."
"When they analyzed fMRI data across the whole brain, one connection stood out. In the normal brain, the anterior insula, a region that integrates bodily sensations, sends signals to a region that governs emotions, the anterior cingulate cortex.
"You could think of it as the anterior cingulate cortex receiving this information about the body—like heart rate or temperature—and then deciding how to feel on the basis of all these signals," Mitra said.
In three-quarters of the participants with depression, however, the typical flow of activity was reversed: The anterior cingulate cortex sent signals to the anterior insula. The more severe the depression, the higher the proportion of signals that traveled the wrong way."
"When depressed patients were treated with SNT, the flow of neural activity shifted to the normal direction within a week, coinciding with a lifting of their depression."
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-depression-reversing-brain-wrong.html
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18, @10:17AM (1 child)
> "You could think of it as the anterior cingulate cortex receiving this information about the body—like heart rate or temperature—and then deciding how to feel on the basis of all these signals"
Or you could think of it as the latest version of phrenology, or any of many other gross simplifications of the brain that have been proposed over the ages.
I'm willing to believe that magnetic stimulation helps some people and that is good news. But I seriously doubt that the very coarse* fMRI data proves or reveals much of any real detail about how the brain and depression actually works. fMRI may be the currently best tool for exploring live brains, but it's still far from the tool that is actually needed to understand what is going on in our heads.
*Coarse resolution compared to the size of neurons.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday May 19, @06:52AM
It's one of a million other proposed means of treating depression, and in particular a sledgehammer approach like vagus nerve stimulation which sometimes works in some cases but no-one really knows the specifics of how or why, and the only to tell whether it'll work for you is to try it. They're vastly overselling it, long term it'll invariably be found to work in a few cases to varying degrees, but not much more.