Medical Breakthrough In Treating Depression
Published: May 18, 2006
A breakthrough treatment for people with epilepsy could help people with depression. Doctors at the University of Cincinnati are now using a kind of pacemaker for the brain in people who don’t respond to other treatments.
Karen Davis was diagnosed with depression nearly 20 years ago. She had been suffering from seizures due to epilepsy. Even with medication and therapy, her health continued to decline. ” With the depression, it keeps you in the house,” Karen said. “You don’t want to be around people. People shun you because you have mental health issues.” She made the choice to undergo a delicate procedure that may help both problems. It’s a procedure that is providing a new option for patients when other treatments haven’t worked. Vegas nerve stimulation is done in a surgery that lasts little more than an hour. We were there as Dr. Sid Khosla, a ear, nose, and throat specialist, slipped a tiny coil under Karen’s skin in her neck. He wrapped it around the vegas nerve that runs up to the base of the brain. “The vegas nerve tells us what the world inside us is doing,” Dr. Khosla explained. He then implanted what looks like a pacemaker into the upper chest. It is programmed from outside the body with a handheld device to send small pulses up the vegas nerve from the part of the brain that stimulates mood and emotion. “Over time it works more and more effectively.”
It’s too soon to tell how well it will work for Karen, but studies in patients with treatment resistant depression so far have shown remarkable results. “About a third of them show a dramatic response within three months, the other third or so within 12 months.” Those results are something that gives Karen Davis hope for happiness that she says she hasn’t had in a long time.
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