Drug-free treatment for depression reduces symptoms in just five days, experts claim: ‘Meaningful relief in less than one week’
People with depression could see their mood lifted in just five days thanks to an intensive version of a treatment which stimulates the brain with magnetic pulses, a new study has found.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) has previously shown promising results in the treatment of depression, reducing symptoms in up to 70 per cent of patients.
Conventionally, this treatment is normally administered once a day for five days a week, with significant results seen after at least six weeks – but only around a quarter of patients achieve remission, which is defined as feeling like their ‘normal’ self for at least two months.
But now, US researchers from UCLA Health say that an accelerated version of the treatment – where patients undergo five sessions per day over a five day period – could be just as effective.
Michael Apostol, study lead author said: ‘For patients with treatment-resistant depression, getting to the clinic every weekday for at least six weeks can be a real obstacle.
‘What this study suggests is that we may be able to offer those same patients a path to meaningful relief in less than one week by condensing 25 TMS treatments over just five days.’
TMS works by sending magnetic pulses of low-level electric current through specific areas of the brain, stimulating or suppressing the cells, with the hopes of changing their behaviour.
For the study, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, 175 people with treatment-resistant depression were given TMS therapy.
Patients who underwent an accelerated course of therapy were as likely to see significant improvement in their symptoms than those who had the conventional treatment
One group of 135 participants received conventional TMS consisting of one session per day, five days a week for a total of six weeks.
The remaining participants received the accelerated treatment of five sessions a day, for just five days.
Depression improved in both groups, according to their scores on standard depression scales, with no statistical difference in outcomes between the approaches.
However the researchers noted that a subgroup of patients who underwent accelerated treatment showed little improvement in symptoms immediately after therapy.
But when researchers followed-up two-to-four-weeks later, those same patients showed meaningful improvement, with depression scores dropping by around 36 per cent.
No other subgroup showed such significant improvements after a month.
This finding carries a practical implication for how TMS is administered, the researchers said, suggesting that patients who do not respond straight away may still benefit from the treatment.
‘All patients in this study had not benefitted from multiple trials of antidepressant medication, yet they obtained great benefit from 5×5 treatment,’ Dr Andrew Leuchter, director of the TMS Service at the University of California and study senior author, said.
This diagram explains how TMS machines work in practice
‘Some patients need to wait a few days or weeks to see benefit, and we encourage them not to give up too quickly if they don’t feel better right away.
‘We are finding that the benefits of 5×5 can be even greater with an extra day of treatment after two weeks,’ he added.
Currently five per cent of adults worldwide are thought to be living with depression.
The most common treatments are antidepressants and psychological therapies, but more than a third of people with major depressive disorder do not reach remission.
The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) recognised TMS as a safe and effective treatment for depression in 2015.
It works my encouraging neurons in frontal regions of the brain to fire more readily, an effect that is thought to have a beneficial impact on the wider brain network affected by depression.
Unlike many antidepressants, TMS, has relatively little side effects and often works for patients who have not responded to anti-depressant drugs.
A 2018 study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology reported that patients with depression were significantly more likely to no longer have symptoms after receiving TMS treatment (five days a week, for a month) compared with a group that received sham therapy. Although it’s worth noting there was no long-term follow-up to assess the duration of remission.
