According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, depression is a fundamentally dominant change of mood. It is almost three times more common in women (58.5%) than men (23.3%) and there are 2.1 million people in our country who suffer from depression. Many of them are resistant to various treatments and these are the ones a new discovery may hold the answer to: reversal of brain signals,
According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, magnetic pulses applied to the scalp to stimulate the brain can provide a Rapid relief to many severely depressed patients for whom standard treatments have failed. However, how transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) actually changes the brain to reduce depression has long remained a mystery. The study, led by Anish Mitra of Stanford University, found that the treatment works by reversing the direction of abnormal brain signals.
“The main hypothesis was that TMS could change the flow of neural activity in the brain — but to be honest, I was quite skeptical and wanted to try it,” Mitra explains in a statement. Mitra developed a mathematical tool for analyzing functional magnetic resonance images, or fMRI, Used to locate active areas in the brain, The new analysis used minute differences in time between the activation of different regions to reveal the direction of that activity. “It was the perfect test to see if TMS had the ability to change the flow of signals through the brain,” says Mitra.
The authors analyzed 33 patients who were diagnosed a treatment-resistant depressive disorder, Twenty-three received a treatment known as Stanford neuromodulation therapy, which is similar to stimulation alone that incorporates advanced imaging techniques to guide the stimulation. The other 10 received a sham treatment that mimicked SNT but without magnetic stimulation. They compared data from these patients to 85 volunteers without depression.
When they looked at the fMRI data across the entire brain, it uncovered a connection. In the normal brain, the anterior insula, an area that integrates physical sensations, sends signals to the area that controls emotion, the anterior cingulate cortex. “You can imagine that the anterior cingulate cortex receives this information about the body, such as heart rate or temperature, and then Decide how to feel based on all these signs“, says Mitra. However, in three-quarters of participants with depression, the typical flow of activity was reversed: The anterior cingulate cortex sent signals to the anterior insula. The more severe the depression, the higher the proportion of symptoms who were going in the opposite direction.
Mitra confirms, “We looked at who is the sender and who is the recipient in a relationship, what really matters is whether someone is depressed.” “It’s almost as if you’ve already decided how you’re going to feel, and then everything else is filtered through what you were feeling. Mood becomes almost a primary function. Changed to normal address in a week, coincides with the end of his depression. The findings also suggest that retrograde streams of neural activity between key areas of the brain could be used as a biomarker to help diagnose depression.
