A conceptual diagram of a brain implantation electrode device developed by researchers at UC San Francisco. Provided by Nature Medicine.
A study result was published that successfully treated a 36-year-old female patient with severe depression through brain electrical stimulation for five years. By detecting patterns of brain activity related to depression and stimulating them through electrodes implanted in the brain, the patient smiled naturally for the first time in five years.
Although it was a treatment attempt on a single patient, it is noteworthy as the first to prove that brain electrostimulation therapy can restore a patient who has suffered from depression for years to a healthy state.
Catherine Skangos, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UC San Francisco), succeeded in treating a patient who had suffered from depression for 5 years through brain electrical stimulation, and published it in the international academic journal Nature Medicine on the 4th (local time).
“There has never been a case in the field of psychiatric research where individuals have been treated with such electrical stimulation of the brain,” Skangos said.
10-30% of patients with depression do not respond well to treatment. In the UK alone, there are about 2.7 million people with depression who do not respond to both antidepressants.
For more than 20 years, scientists have treated tens of thousands of patients with Parkinson’s disease or epilepsy using deep-brain electrical stimulation. However, treatment for depression has often failed. It was analyzed that this is because the brain region that causes depression is not limited to one place, but because interconnected regions work in a complex way, and the regions can differ from person to person.
“We started by understanding the complexities involved in how a patient’s mood is regulated by a network in the brain,” said Edward Chang, a professor at UC San Francisco, who participated in the study. Patients who succeeded in treatment recorded their moods for a week while accumulating electrical stimulation data implanted in their brains. The research team succeeded in identifying activity patterns in the amygdala region of the brain when a patient’s mood is at its lowest by using a machine learning algorithm, an artificial intelligence (AI) technique.
During this repetitive process, through trial and error, we found a brain region closely connected to the ‘striatum’, the region that receives information from the central part of the brain. found out the facts A 36-year-old depressed patient who participated in the study said in an interview with the British daily The Guardian, “I felt the most intense joy when I applied the first stimulus.” “It was the first time in five years that I laughed spontaneously.”
The research team did not stop there, but implanted a device into the patient’s brain that detects the pattern of depression signals occurring in the brain amygdala and automatically delivers the stimulus to the brain’s central striatum. Devices with small batteries are semi-permanent. As a result of implanting the device into the patients participating in the study, stimulation occurred about 300 times a day, and in all, stimulation was performed for about 30 minutes. However, it was found that there were no side effects except for the phenomenon of being slightly alert.
“It will be a whole new way to address the most difficult cases of depression, as symptoms can be treated as soon as they occur,” said Professor Skangos. The patient said, “Before the treatment, I was hardly active, and I did not think of anything except the ugly things in the world.” “For five years, even the treatment drugs were of no use, but this treatment confirmed the idea that depression can be cured.”
The price of the brain implantation device developed by the research team is about 35,000 dollars (about 41.6 million won). The research team has already enrolled two more patients to confirm the effectiveness of the treatment and is currently recruiting nine more patients.
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