Scientists are working hard to find more depression treatments for those people for who traditional remedies don’t work or are no longer effective. Dr. Helen Mayberg has found that deep brain stimulation may prove to be an effective treatment even for those who do not benefit from shock therapy.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) may be an effective intervention for treatment-resistant depression, offering a way to reconceptualize depression and its treatment, said Helen Mayberg, M.D., during the Frontiers in Science Lecture at APA’s 2012 annual meeting in Philadelphia in May.
Mayberg described recent research and outlined future challenges to the use of DBS in treatment-resistant depression. “Neuromodulation of brain circuits implicated in depression using DBS as a new strategy has been facilitated by recent advances in stereotaxic neurosurgery, experience with stimulation of brain circuits in other neurological disorders, and the availability of structural/functional imaging to guide the use of DBS,” she said.
She is a professor of psychiatry and neurology and the Dorothy Fuqua Chair in Psychiatry Imaging and Therapeutics at Emory University.
Mayberg said the motivation for studying DBS derives from the incomplete success of current therapies for depression and the paucity of treatments for treatment-resistant depression. She noted that 40 percent of patients receiving psychotropic medication, cognitive-behavioral therapy, or another form of treatment achieve remission, but 10 percent become treatment resistant over time, and there are few options for patients who do not recover using ECT.
Moreover, she said, psychopharmacologic innovation has been stuck in a 50-year focus on monamines, with few new leads. Meanwhile there is no clear pathology to depression and no obvious biomarkers. And animal models of depression do not capture the phenomena of recurrence, relapse, and remission. More at Technique Offers Hope for Treatment-Resistant Depression
As this article shows, while there are no clear cut answers at this point scientists are working on discovering not only why some treatments work for some patients but not others but also what can help those patients for who the usual treatment options have been exhausted.
This video talks about an article written by Dr. J. Michael Bostwick. This article is a great guide about medications for depression.
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