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TMS In The News
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If you have been diagnosed with MDD and medications are not working, or are causing strong side effects, you may be a good candidate for TMS. In today’s article, Dr. Mania answers some frequently asked questions about this type of treatment.
Doctors at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA Health are taking a different approach to help patients.
Instead of drugs, they’re beaming magnetic pulses deep inside a patient's brain to change the way depression symptoms are perceived. It's called transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS and it's currently FDA approved to treat depression only.
We’ve all heard about counseling therapy and medication as ways of treating depression but have you heard of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)? This approach “uses short pulses of a magnetic field to stimulate nerve cells in the area of the brain thought to control mood” in an attempt to create a positive effect on the brain’s neurotransmitter levels.
While the name and description might sound complicated, the actual experience of receiving TMS therapy is not. Patients are fully awake, sitting in a chair with a small, curved magnetic coil placed on their head. They will hear a clicking sound and feel gentle tapping on their head. When the treatment is over, they can resume normal activities, including driving themselves home… but does it work?
NeuroStar Advanced Therapy has the largest clinical data set of any TMS treatment. With studies including more than 900 people, many NeuroStar patients saw their symptoms significantly improve after four to six weeks of treatment.