This woman’s brain implant zaps her with electricity when it senses she’s getting depressed

Good news! Amazing stuff!

"Sarah, a 36-year-old woman living in California, had lived with chronic depression for five years. She felt suicidal multiple times an hour and was unable to make decisions about basic questions like what to eat. Nothing she had tried to treat it, including electroconvulsive therapy, had helped.

Then, in June 2020, she had an implant inserted into her skull that zaps the parts of her brain that cause her illness. The remarkable results, published in Nature Medicine today, raise the prospect of personalized treatments for people with severe mental illnesses that don’t respond to therapy or medication. ..."

This is the entire abstract:

"Deep brain stimulation is a promising treatment for neuropsychiatric conditions such as major depression. It could be optimized by identifying neural biomarkers that trigger therapy selectively when symptom severity is elevated. We developed an approach that first used multi-day intracranial electrophysiology and focal electrical stimulation to identify a personalized symptom-specific biomarker and a treatment location where stimulation improved symptoms. We then implanted a chronic deep brain sensing and stimulation device and implemented a biomarker-driven closed-loop therapy in an individual with depression. Closed-loop therapy resulted in a rapid and sustained improvement in depression. Future work is required to determine if the results and approach of this n-of-1 study generalize to a broader population."

This woman’s brain implant zaps her with electricity when it senses she’s getting depressed | MIT Technology Review Her experience suggests that such personalized devices could help those who’ve exhausted all other treatment options.

Closed-loop neuromodulation in an individual with treatment-resistant depression (No public access, but the MIT Technology Review article above allows you to access this article)