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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: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday May 18, @03:17PM (3 children)
Yes anon, that's another example of Parent's "try anything" exemption.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aafcac on Thursday May 18, @06:00PM (2 children)
There's also a lot of times where something appears to work, but the consequences of it can take decades to become apparent. This includes things like Tardive dyskinesia from antipsychotic medication or just completely fucking an autistic person's entire brain up using Applied Behavioral Analysis. It looks effective in the short term for the same reason that it works on animals, in the long term, it doesn't do anything to help and just pushes the patient into a position where massive amounts of their emotions are being suppressed until they can't contain it.
It's a shame that longitudinal studies can be so hard to conduct without running afoul of ethics violations. As it's been the only way to know the real long term consequences in many cases. Thankfully, things like heart cells on a chip can help to identify when things are outright toxic to an organ, hopefully eventually it can be figured out for more complicated systems.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 18, @07:33PM (1 child)
>just completely fucking an autistic person's entire brain up using Applied Behavioral Analysis.
No mystery there - PTSD from sadistic torture is well documented.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Friday May 19, @12:32AM
Right, the problem though is predicting such things ahead of time and then determining whether the results are better enough than doing nothing to justify the treatment. And that's assuming that the people involved know enough to properly communicate the risks and benefits of the treatment in a way that the patient can understand. Unfortunately, in many cases you're talking about children where the parents are making the decisions. Not to mention that in some cases, even if a treatment is safe, it may not be effective if what's causing the problem is something else.