Antidepressant Implant
The device implanted in the brain saves from severe depression
Scientists led by Katherine Scangos from the Department of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, successfully cured a woman of severe depression with a brain implant.
The device works by detecting patterns of brain activity associated with depression and automatically interrupts them with micro-pulses of electrical stimulation directed deep into the brain. Neuroscientists have demonstrated for the first time that the brain activity underlying the symptoms of mental illness can be reliably detected and then returned to a healthy state even in a patient who has been ill for many years. 36-year-old patient Sarah, who participated in the clinical trial, says that the therapy brought her back to "a life worth living", allowed her to laugh spontaneously for the first time in five years.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS), which uses an implant that sends electrical impulses to a specific part of the brain, has been actively developing in the last two decades. This method has achieved the greatest success in the treatment of symptoms of Parkinson's disease, where it has already helped thousands of patients. Also, deep brain stimulation is successfully used for dystonia, tremor and chronic pain. However, when trying to use this method to treat depression, scientists have encountered difficulties. The main problem is that there is no specific "depression zone" in the brain, several interconnected brain regions may be involved in the patient, and they may differ in different people.
Success was achieved with an individual approach. At the initial stage, which lasted a week, a temporary brain implant recorded a wide range of activity, while Sarah regularly recorded a report on her mood on a tablet. A machine learning algorithm has identified characteristic patterns of neural activity in the amygdala region accompanying depression maxima.
Through trial and error, the scientists identified a closely related brain region, the ventral striatum, where a tiny dose of electricity had an immediate and profound effect. "When I first received stimulation, I experienced a strong joyful feeling, and my depression turned into a distant nightmare for a moment," says Sarah.
Then a permanent device was implanted into Sarah's brain to detect the "signature of depression" in the activity of amygdala neurons and automatic stimulation of the ventral striatum. This happens about 300 times a day, which is equivalent to about 30 minutes of stimulation. According to Sarah, the electrical impulse is not accompanied by any sensations, except for a faint sense of concentration and positivity.
The cost of the device is about 35 thousand dollars. It is an adapted version of the NeuroPace RNS system used to treat epilepsy. The researchers have found two more patients and hope to attract nine more to assess whether the technique can be applied more widely.
The clinical trial report is published in the journal Nature Medicine (Scangos et al., Closed-loop neuromodulation in an individual with treatment-resistant depression).
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