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A new study identifies an area of the brain that, after being electrically stimulated, appears to improve the symptoms of depression. The results open the door for further research on the impact of deep brain stimulation in the treatment of resistant depression.
Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco suggest that direct electrical stimulation of a brain brain region called orbitofrontal cortex ( COF) can help relieve the symptoms of depression in cases where this disease is resistant to other non-invasive therapies.
Deep brain stimulation consists of: when implanting electrodes in very specific areas of the brain, with the objective of modulating abnormal neuronal activity that may be originally, for example, abnormal movements characteristic of Parkinson's disease, a disease in which this application has been most applied.
PKU has also been evaluated as a treatment for resistant depression, which patients are suffering from. They have seen no improvement with many of the conventional pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatments currently on the market.
The research of American scientists was conducted on patients with epilepsy also suffering from depression to varying degrees, ranging from mild to profound. 19659004] When taking PKU, patients with moderate to severe depression showed almost instant improvement in their symptoms although to date the treatment has only been applied for a few minutes.
interesting to read: Serotonin, much more than a "modulator of depression"
Three birds and a blow
Intracranial grid of electrocorticography electrodes | Blausen.com staff (2014). "Medical Blausen Medical Gallery 2014". WikiJournal of Medicine
There are those who shine with efficiency and this seems to be the case.
It turns out that the scientists who conducted this study took advantage of the fact that some patients with epilepsy who undergo surgery to control this disease must first go to work. electrocorticography a technique to record the electrical activity of the brain.
To perform an electrocorticogram, the patient is implanted electrodes in the cerebral cortex to record the electrical activity and determine the focus of seizures. Epileptics
The researchers recruited 25 patients with epilepsy who were under electrocorticography and also suffered from depression.
Initially, they were asked to rate their mood several times a day. . With the data in hand, they examined the electrical activity of the brain and established a link between these recordings and the natural variations in the mood of the patients.
The badysis allowed us to identify several regions of the brain that appear to be involved in depressive symptoms.
In a second part of the investigation, scientists stimulated these brain regions with the help of already implanted electrodes, while they asked patients their moods.
Result? Surely you can imagine: the stimulation of several regions did not seem to have had any noticeable effect, until the lateral orbitofrontal cortex was stimulated. Dr. Kristin Sellers, one of the authors of the study, states:
Patients were saying such things as: "Wow, I feel better", "I feel less anxious", I am calm, brilliant and serene sense. And only anecdotally, improvements in patients' body language could be noticed. They smiled, straightened up, started talking faster and more naturally. "
As the researchers have observed, stimulation was effective in patients with moderate and severe symptoms of depression, not in patients with mild symptoms, which your opinion says is in favor of an effect on the disease itself and not simply an improvement of the mood in general
You might also be interested in reading : 3 more radical treatments of depression
For the moment, it was for a few minutes
During the investigation, the maximum time during which the stimulation was applied was a little over 3 minutes, which clearly makes it impossible to badert that ECD of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex is a valid therapeutic pathway for depression resistant.
For the moment, researchers simply state that their results "reveal the orbitofrontal cortex. As a promising new target for therapeutic stimulation of the brain in mood disorders. "
In addition, they suggest that the detection of abnormal activities in this region could in the future become a biomarker of the disease. All the more so as d & # 39; 39 Other studies have found hyperactivity in this area in people with depression that decreases when they take antidepressants.
You may also be interested in reading: They dare to defend it : Electroconvulsive therapy should not be the last option in case of resistant depression
Sources
Rao, Vikram R. et al (2018): Direct electrical stimulation of the cortex Lateral orbitofrontal significantly improves the mood of people with symptoms of depression. Current Biology .
University of California at San Francisco (2018): Brain Stimulation Relieves Symptoms my depression at https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/uoc-bsr112618.php
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