Depression may be treated with direct electrical brain stimulation at home. What does the patient feel and what is the procedure

The use of electric currents to treat the brain is becoming widespread again. A study published in the journal “Nature Medicine” details the benefits of headphones equipped with electrodes to treat depression directly at the patient’s home. Similar tests are done either in the hospital or at home for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, chronic pain, addiction, headaches and many other diseases.

Surrender republic, the electrical stimulation of the brain that is used today is very different from the electroshocks that were used as therapy in the past. In the first instance, about one milliamps are injected into the head, at very precise points, which the patient does not see. The electric shock used currents a thousand times stronger.

Professor Barbara Borroni, who teaches neurology at the University of Brescia, told Italian media: “There is still much to understand and develop, but electrical or magnetic brain stimulation techniques are becoming tools very common for the treatment of many neurological or psychiatric diseases. every disorder, a specific area of ​​the brain needs to be stimulated.”

She explained how the whole procedure was done: “We tried to treat patients with Alzheimer’s. During an initial visit to the hospital we made a helmet to make the head of the person receiving treatment. the patient the stimulation sessions at home, and then with doctors via video call. The results were good.

Even the mood of the 173 patients presented in the publication Nature, who come from Great Britain and the United States and are followed by King’s College London, improved after they applied electrodes on both sides the forehead The average depression score decreased from 19 to 11. The helmet was first applied 5 times a week for 3 weeks, then 3 times a week for another 7 weeks. Each session lasted half an hour, with the doctors connected by video call to make sure everything was going well.

At-home headphones that promise to improve brain performance have come to be advertised and sold on the Internet: they are popular among video game enthusiasts, for example. But the risk of inappropriate use of this headset is one of the concerns of doctors who prescribe electrical stimulation to their patients.

“Doctors are programmed by doctors: they can only be used when they are established in the treatment protocol and only with the parameters decided in the hospital,” explained Borroni. “The procedure is safe, it does not cause discomfort, it can be used on almost all patients and it has no side effects. happening.

Direct current, alternating current or magnetic stimulation are variations of the same family of treatments that work on the transmission of electrical signals between neurons. In the case of direct current, used in this case for depression, the electric current between neurons that has been lost is restored.

Magnetic stimulation is probably the most advanced and effective of the methods that work on synapses, that is, on the electrical connections between neurons, but it requires a lot of equipment and can only be given in a hospital , which is a problem when the treatment is almost necessary. daily sessions.