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Severe depression patients had an amazing response to a treatment being studied and it's being called a possible game-changer. The possible groundbreaking treatment was has been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Stanford University Medical Center tested a magnetic treatment on patients aged 22 to 80 years old. Those patients had severe depression for an average of nine years. The treatment is called Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy (SAINT),
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The magnetic brain stimulation treatment was tested on 29 participants who had proven resistant to depression medication. They were divided into two groups, one received the SAINT treatment. The other group received what appeared to be the same treatment, but was a place group.
The half that got the real treatment for 5 days revealed an amazing success rate. Nearly 80% of them no longer had symptoms that would qualify them as depressed. They continued to lack depression symptoms long after the treatments were over.
The only side effects reported were headaches and temporary fatigue.
One of Stanford researchers was quoted by zmescience.com said,
“It works well, it works quickly and it’s noninvasive,” said Nolan Williams, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “It could be a game changer.” He was the senior author of the study.
Current treatments being used today transcranial magnetic stimulation have only had moderate success. But the SAINT treatment builds on the treatment by targeting magnetic pulses to personalized areas of the person's neaurocircuitry.
“We want to get this into emergency departments and psychiatric wards where we can treat people who are in a psychiatric emergency,” Williams said. “The period right after hospitalization is when there’s the highest risk of suicide.”