Experimental UC Davis Therapy Treats Depression With Magnets To Head
/ CBS Sacramento
DAVIS (CBS13) — Scientists are working on a way to essentially rewire a brain to treat a number of disorders.
Deep transcranial magnetic stimulation sends magnetic waves through your brain, targeting areas that cause problems such as obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder.
UC Davis psychiatrist Dr. Guohua Xia is a researcher on the forefront of the research. It works sort of like an MRI, where patients wear a helmet that delivers magnetic pulses to targeted portions of the brain.
"The patient feels like a tapping kind of feeling, the muscle contract," he said.
The technique is supposed to regulate brain activity, and Xia has already received FDA approval to treat patients for depressions.
"The result is better than what I expected before the trial started," he said.
Small trials have even shown the therapy might help people lose weight. Xia was not a part of that research, but he can see how it would work.
"Theoretically it can suppress for example, the eating center, or suppress the rewarding system to suppress some urge to eat more," he said.
Patients got the treatment for up to 40 minutes on work days, and he says it takes about a month to treat a major depressive attitude.
The technology has actually been around since the 1980s, but Xia's new machine penetrates deeper into the brain, giving him more consistent results than past research.
Studies so far show the therapy is safe, but the long term effects are unknown.
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