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Home > Archive > Depression Medications > February 2006 > rTMS
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| NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Jan 27 - Repetitive transcranial magnetic
stimulation (rTMS) can speed the response to antidepressant agents in
patients with major depressive disorder, Italian researchers report.
Previous studies looking at rTMS have largely focused on its use for
drug-resistant and severe depression and few studies have looked the
procedure as an adjunct to drug therapy in patients without resistant
disease.
According to senior author Dr. Raffaella Zanardi and colleagues, the present
study marks the first time that rTMS has been evaluated as a way to hasten
the antidepressant response in a double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled
trial.
The 5-week study involved 99 inpatients who were randomized to receive
sertraline, venlafaxine, or escitalopram combined with 2 weeks of either
real or sham rTMS, note the authors, from Vita-Salute university in Milan.
With the real intervention, 15-Hz rTMS was applied to the left dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex.
The investigators' findings appear in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry for
December.
Patients treated with the real rTMS experienced a faster drop in the
Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D) than did patients given the
sham treatment (p = 0.0029). The rTMS-treated patients showed a
significantly greater drop in the HAM-D score at each week of the study,
except the last.
Also, rTMS appeared to be equally effective in hastening the response to the
three antidepressant agents tested.
"Many of our patients achieved a fast response and were remitters at the end
of the trial," the authors comment. "However, it is reasonable to
hypothesize that a longer period of rTMS treatment for those who did not
respond may have yielded an even higher response rate."
J Clin Psychiatry 2005;66:1569-1575.
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| Squiggles 2006-02-25, 6:57 pm |
| Thanks, but no thanks.
Squiggles
Joe wrote:
> NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Jan 27 - Repetitive transcranial magnetic
> stimulation (rTMS) can speed the response to antidepressant agents in
> patients with major depressive disorder, Italian researchers report.
>
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| What do u mean?
"Squiggles" <squiggle@sympatico.ca> ???????:43ECAE9B.2010205@sympatico.ca...
> Thanks, but no thanks.
>
> Squiggles
>
> Joe wrote:
>
>
>
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