A new study has found that your heart’s reaction in the first minute of a brain stimulation treatment might help doctors know if the treatment will work for depression.
This exciting discovery could make it easier to help people with depression feel better faster, especially those who don’t respond to regular antidepressants.
The study was led by Dr. Roberto Goya-Maldonado and his team at the University Medical Center Göttingen in Germany.
It was published in the journal Brain Medicine.
The researchers wanted to see if the body could give early signs of whether a treatment called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) would be effective.
TMS uses magnetic pulses on the head to change brain activity, and one advanced version is called intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS). This version sends faster pulses over a shorter time.
They studied 75 people with major depression. All of them received the iTBS treatment, and their heartbeats were carefully tracked using an ECG machine.
The researchers paid close attention to how the heart rate changed in the first 45 seconds after the treatment started.
They found that people whose heart rate slowed down during that short window were more likely to feel much better after six weeks.
This didn’t happen in people who got a fake treatment (called sham), which means the heart’s reaction was a real sign that the brain was reacting to the therapy.
The researchers also tried something else. They used brain scans to personalize where on the head the magnetic pulses should go, hoping it would improve results. They thought that stimulating the perfect spot based on each person’s brain might work better than using the same spot for everyone.
But surprisingly, using the same standard spot worked just as well. The custom method didn’t lead to better outcomes, which was unexpected. This might be because it’s hard to place the machine exactly on the right spot each time—it often missed by more than one centimeter.
Why does the heart rate slow down when the brain is stimulated? Scientists believe it’s because the treatment activates a pathway between the brain and the heart.
This pathway includes a part of the brain that helps control emotions, and it sends signals to the heart through the nervous system. When the brain reacts well to the treatment, the heart shows that by slowing down briefly. That’s a positive sign.
However, not all heart-related reactions were good news. In the same study, if a person’s heart rate variability (a different heart rhythm signal) went up during treatment, they were less likely to feel better after one week.
This part is still a mystery and shows there’s more to learn about how the brain and heart talk to each other during treatment.
The good news is that these heart signals might be used in the future to adjust treatment in real time. Doctors could watch how the heart responds during the first session and decide whether to change the treatment settings right away.
This might help more people get better results without waiting for weeks. Right now, only 30% to 50% of people respond to this kind of therapy, so this could be a big improvement.
This matters because depression affects many people—up to 20% of the population—and some people don’t feel better even after trying many medications. For these people, brain stimulation is a valuable option, and making it more effective could help them recover faster.
The treatment in this study was intense. Patients got 36,000 pulses over two weeks, with four sessions each day. This is faster than traditional methods and aims to bring results more quickly.
In the future, researchers want to see if combining heart monitoring with other body signals will help even more. They also want to test this heart-based method in different groups of people to make sure it works for everyone. More studies are needed to fully understand the connection between the heart, brain, and mood.
In summary, this study shows a new and simple way to tell if a treatment for depression might work. By paying attention to the heart in the first minute of treatment, doctors may be able to give patients better care sooner. This could be a big step forward in treating hard-to-treat depression.
If you care about heart health, please read studies that vitamin K helps cut heart disease risk by a third, and a year of exercise reversed worrisome heart failure.
For more health information, please see recent studies about supplements that could help prevent heart disease, stroke, and results showing this food ingredient may strongly increase heart disease death risk.
The study is published in Brain Medicine.
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