Personalized brain stimulation may help alleviate symptoms of severe depression

A new personalized brain stimulation approach has been reported to provide relief from symptoms of severe treatment-resistant depression in at least one person. The study, which has been published in Nature Medicine, revealed that this relief was experienced within minutes. In this study, the researchers used a minimally invasive approach termed ‘stereo EEG’ to identify person-specific therapeutic stimulation sites. Ten intracranial electrode leads were placed into the brain of the first participant, a 36-year-old woman who had experienced multiple episodes of severe treatment-resistant depression since childhood. The investigators found that stimulating different sites could alleviate distinct symptoms of the brain...