WASHINGTON — It’s a new frontier for psychiatric illness: brain pacemakers that promise to act as antidepressants by changing how patients’ nerve circuitry fires.
Scientists already know the power of these devices to block tremors of Parkinson’s disease and related illnesses; more than 40,000 patients worldwide have the implants.
But psychiatric illnesses are much more complex, and the new experiments with deep brain stimulation, or DBS, are in their infancy. Only a few dozen patients with severe depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder so far have been treated in closely monitored studies.
Still, the early results are promising. Dramatic video shows one patient visibly brightening as doctors turn on her brain pacemaker and she says in surprise: “I’m starting to smile.”
“Not all patients get better, but when patients respond, it’s significant,” says Dr. Helen Mayberg of Emory University, who has implanted about 50 depression patients.
Her first patient remains in remission after five years.
