Experimental Brain
Implant Could
Personalize
Depression Therapy
Symptoms subsided for one
woman after a carefully targeted
neural circuit was stimulated
Sarah remembers what it was like
both before and after the treatment.
The 36-year-old vividly recalls how,
after her depression lifted, she had to
readapt to performing the tasks other
people do routinely each day. Even
the simple act of looking at a menu
took readjustment.
“I also had to learn, relearn,” she
said at a press briefing, “how to
actually have opinions about things
and actually pick something on a
menu and order it and not just go
along with what everyone else
wanted. Because I was so used to the
fact that I couldn’t make decisions,
that [ability], over the last five years.... ,
just atrophied and disappeared.”
Sarah’s intractable depression,
which had not responded even to
electroconvulsive therapy, yielded
after an experimental treatment
conducted at the University of Cali -
fornia, San Francisco. The treatment
detects depression-related brain
activity and then applies electrical
stimulation at a targeted location to
relieve symptoms. The device usedfor the procedure has already been
approved for treating epilepsy by
providing brain stimulation after it
registers electrical patterns that
predict an oncoming seizure.
In the October 4, 2021, study inNature Medicine, the researchers
describe how they set about to find a
stimulation site using electrodes to
probe emotion circuitry in Sarah’s
brain. As they looked, they found that
one site might lower anxiety and that
Maurice Ramirez/U.C.S.F.Sarah, who received
a brain implant for her
depression, is attended
by researcher Katherine
Scangos of the Univer-
sity of California,
San Francisco.NEWS