New buzz on brain stimulation for depression [News]

Here are three things we know for sure about deep brain stimulation (DBS) as a treatment for severe depression: 1. When the pacemaker-like brain implants do help depressed people, those people get dramatically better. "I have patients who got their implants 10 years ago now," says Helen Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at Emory University, in Atlanta. "These people get well and they stay well," she says. 2. Unfortunately, DBS doesn't help everybody. Experimental trials by Mayberg and others have consistently had a subset of people who simply don't respond to the treatment. And two big industry-sponsored trials were counted as failures by the companies involved, squashing hopes that the treatment would soon be available for mainstream clinical use. 3. Researchers must figure out why some depressed patients respond to DBS while others don't; otherwise their experiments will never lead to a truly practical treatment that can gain regulators' approval. Two new academic studies show that researchers are progressing toward that understanding.