Depression Treatment Shows Early Promise but Longer Therapy May Be Needed
Major depressive disorder is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. It affects how people think, feel, sleep, work, and enjoy life.
Although antidepressant medicines and psychological therapies help many people, a large number continue to experience symptoms despite trying several treatments. Because of this, researchers have been searching for new approaches that work in different ways.
One treatment attracting increasing attention is intermittent theta-burst stimulation, or iTBS. This is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate specific areas of the brain involved in mood regulation.
Unlike surgery, no cuts or implants are needed. The treatment is performed while the patient is awake, and each session takes only a few minutes. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared iTBS for clinical use in 2018.
A new study published in JAMA Network Open examined whether a standard course of once-daily iTBS could improve depression symptoms better than a placebo treatment.
Researchers recruited 73 adults between 22 and 65 years of age who had major depressive disorder. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either real iTBS or a carefully designed sham treatment that looked, sounded, and felt like the real procedure but did not deliver meaningful brain stimulation.
Each participant completed one treatment session on ten weekdays. Researchers assessed depression before treatment, halfway through the program, after the tenth session, and again four weeks later. They used standard depression rating scales completed by both doctors and patients, as well as brain imaging.
The results were encouraging at first. After only five treatment sessions, patients receiving real iTBS showed greater improvement than those receiving placebo. By the end of the ten sessions, doctor-rated depression scores had fallen by about 42 percent in the iTBS group compared with around 22 percent in the placebo group.
However, the improvement did not fully last. Four weeks later, the placebo group had continued to improve, reducing the difference between the two groups until it was no longer statistically meaningful. Interestingly, when participants rated their own symptoms, both groups reported similar levels of improvement throughout the study.
The findings suggest that iTBS may produce rapid relief for some patients, but ten treatment sessions alone may not be enough to provide lasting benefits. Researchers believe longer treatment courses or maintenance sessions may be needed to sustain improvement.
If you care about mental health, please read studies that vegetarian diet may increase your depression risk, and Vitamin D could help reduce depression symptoms.
For more health information, please see recent studies about why pizza is a very addictive food, and MIND diet could improve cognitive health in older people.
Source: JAMA Network Open study.
