Brainsway (the company that is developing the new deep transcranial magnetic stimulation technology) has recently gotten results from a new clinical trial using this device on depressed bipolar patients. Bipolar disorder is a cyclical mental illness. People who have this disorder can have moods that range from euphoric mania to suicidal depression. Bipolar mania and hypomania are often associated with negative outcomes as a patient's behavior can become bizarre and irrational.According to the write up, brainsway said that 80% of patients responded to the treatment with 50% experiencing a significant improvement. When they say significant improvement I'm guessing that they mean a 50% or greater reduction in depressive symptoms. This seems like a surprisingly high improvement rate for this disorder so I'm somewhat skeptical.
It looks like they may have selected bipolar patients who have more treatment resistant depression for the trial so that would make that reduction even more surprising.
"Medication resistance to at least two different antidepressant treatments, defined as resistance to a minimum of 2 antidepressant drug trials of adequate dose and duration in the current episode or previous episodes defined as a minimum level of 3 on the ATHF per antidepressant drug-trial."Treating bipolar depression is fairly difficult because antidepressant treatment can cause them to switch into a manic or hypomanic state. So managing bipolar depression is often much less successful than reducing the symptoms associated with manic episodes. It sounds like this new treatment was successful without the propensity for causing switching.
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