Another milestone development in the treatment of psychiatric illness was recently announced in Cleveland after a new study. This study was conducted by coordinated efforts from research teams at both Cleveland clinic in Cleveland, USA and University of Leuven in Belgium.

 

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 the tremors of Parkinson's disease and related illnesses; more than 40,000 such patients worldwide have the implants.

But psychiatric illnesses are much more complex and the new experiments with so-called 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." And new reports this month show that some worst-case patients are finding lasting relief.

Six of 17 severely depressed patients were in remission a year after undergoing DBS and four more markedly improved, and more than half of 26 obsessive-compulsive patients showed substantial improvement over three years.

 

These promising results will pave the way for new treatment methods involving brain stimulation strategies using pacemakers a much more reliable method than the electroconvulsive therapy used in patients with both acute and chronic psychiatric illnesses.