Scientists find a way to treat depression by deep brain current stimulation

CTOnews.com, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) in clinical and scientific research, electrodes can be implanted deep into the brain to provide regular pulses of current to treat motor disorders such as Parkinson's disease and epilepsy. Now the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has discovered an "emotion decoder" that can treat depression through deep brain stimulation.

The image source MIT related research recently published on MIT Technology Review, neuroscientists for the first time by observing the activity of the human brain to observe its emotional state. The study was recently presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Unlike Parkinson's disease, depression is something we still don't fully understand from a purely neurological point of view. After analyzing the brain records of three of the five volunteers, neuroscientists found that an area of the brain called the cingulate cortex (cingulate cortex) emitted in one way when patients felt better, and in the opposite way when they felt depressed. This pattern was found in all three volunteers.

At present, there is little data on this sample size, and the team has implanted electrodes in four patients with severe depression to see if electrical stimulation can work. The team plans to study 20 cases to observe the effects of current stimulation.

CTOnews.com learned that the whole process was dangerous and expensive. During the test, you need to drill a small hole in the head and then send electricity to all parts of your brain. In addition, the whole test set is also very expensive, with an average cost of $22802 (about 159000 yuan).