Hope for people with treatment resistant Major Depression

Published on July 8, 2012 By DrJBHL In Personal Computing

Many folks have asked for “medical stuff” (enough computer viruses how about human ones?) so, this is about some gadgetry which has caused an earthquake in the treatment of depression.

Many folks have episodes of Depression through their lives, tied to events or not. In most, they resolve without the need for intervention. In many though, medications (thank G-d for them) are needed (and they work well for most, Mr. Cruise). They aren’t uniformly successful, and can cause problems (occasionally severe). They often need change, and for those in whom they failed, or caused other problems only behavioral therapy or ECT (electro-convulsive shock) remained as possibilities.

Now there’s something new: DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation). This form of therapy was initially found for movement disorders (Parkinson’s disease, and the like), and experimentally for anti-pain treatment.

In this form of treatment, electrodes are placed by a Neurosurgical team in problem areas. These devices work very similarly to heart pace makers: There’s a battery and miniprocessor (externally programmable) and electrodes (single or double) on wires placed beyond the problem area of electrical blockage. Some of these devices also function as defibrillators.

So, what does it look like?

Just like that.

Where does it go? In Brodmann Area 25 which is a sort of “conduit” of fibers going from the frontal lobe to the limbic area (regular and in 3D from the Wikipedia):

Graphically:

And in real life:

So, the patient is mildly sedated during the procedure and as electrodes are stimulated, describes his/her feelings. Various electrodes along the wire are stimulated until a helpful one is found. The generator is then programmed and placed under the skin (just like a pacemaker) and wires run under the skin to a connection point (in the xray, the four horizontal bars).

So…. As requested… some medical stuff.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodmann_area_25

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=12999&cn=5

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2006/10/11/area-25-may-help-the-severely-depressed/http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/106460.php

http://www.empowher.com/depression/content/depression-and-brodmann-area-25

http://psychcentral.com/news/2008/06/27/new-study-of-dbs-for-depression/2518.html

Comments (Page 4)

taltamir

on Jul 09, 2012

Sinperium

reply 18

There is a HUGE amount of research driving this sort of invention that has NEVER been seen before.

Yes there is.

The research focus for the past few years on Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, Creutzfeldt–Jakob's Disease, ADD/AAHD as well as depression studies, endocrinology and even the fields of artificial intelligence, neural sciences and cybernetics have synergistically started to dovetail together and are providing huge amounts of very precise data on how the brain and nervous system work.

Very fancy statement saying very little.

It is the first time we have ever had the technological tools to actually map and experiment real-time with the brains multifaceted processes--electromagnetic, hormonal, etc.--while it is working.

Actually fMRI has dominated brain researching since the early 1990s and has been available longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging

This isn't like the days when we used tap hammers to drive metal rods into people's brains to see if it might help. We can now watch in real time the molecular, chemical and physical changes happening in the brain as we interact with it. The understanding of the brain is greater than it has ever been in history and this may be one of those watershed moments where whole new realms of treatment and cure become available.

Depression is one of the biggest issues because it affects everyone in the world and there are so many areas affected by it and causal to it that a lot of information and research is needed. If you have ever known anyone "chemically lobotomized" as the means of managing their symptoms, you'd understand why any sort of experiment that might give hope is worth it to a lot of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

So by pointing out that this is a dangerous ineffective procedure I am suddenly the bad guy trying to steal hope from people suffering from a serious malady for the evulz?

Has it occurred to you that maybe I am concerned for their health? I admit to not being a full blown neurologist but I have take some advance level neuroscience classes on my path to finishing my BS in Molecular Biology. Yes I am not an expert but I am not talking out of my ass here either.

There are serious issues with this kind of treatment which I have outlined and they should not be ignored in the name of hope. Research is fine, promising a cure is going a lot further then just research though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desensitization_(medicine) is a big deal. If you drink cofee, then within as little as 1 week your baseline has dropped so much that 1 cup of coffee in the morning only brings you back to what your baseline was without coffee a week before. (unusually with coffee, it actually allows resensitization, takes about 10 days of abstaining from coffee to get back to normal).

This brain pacemaker is EXPLICITLY described as working by being calibrated based on asking the patient how they feel when a charge is applied to different parts of their brain. When the desired feeling is found it is programmed to deliver regular stimulation to that location. This is pretty big because the constant stimulation of a single zone WILL cause desentization (which, worse, occurs via programmed cell death) and it does not treat the underlying CAUSE of their depression, only forces enough "positive" emotions to alter overall emotion.

Finally, existing medicinal brain implants suffers from causing scar tissue to form on contact point ruining their effectiveness over time. This needs to be solved before this is a viable treatment alternative.

Personally I believe the cause of the scar formation is due to applying gross charges, we need nanotech implants capable of stimulating individual cells with neurotransmitter chemicals. Direct electrical stimulation is dangerous to the cell since it works via a cascade of ions penetrating the membrane and undoing the electrical gradient which cells set up between their inside and outside across the cell membrane, done in effect to create a battery which is also crucial to the functionality of the cell including ATP production.

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