But the question we're all asking is... how does it compare to placebo? Would a DBS placebo be like implanting a sugar pill in your brain?

Hope you're doing well, Liz.

And of the 7.065 people who experienced a 50% reduction in their symptoms, how many might have actually been experiencing nothing more than a naturally more elevated part of their cycle? How many of these 7.065 were able to maintain that level of cessation over a meaningful period of time? Sorry, when we're talking about millions of effected people, it takes more than 7.065 people to get my hopes up.

It's very disturbing to me that inserting probes into brain matter would be considered "minimally invasive" by anyone. It seems to me anyone that would coin this term with brain implants takes their own brain for granted.

A 50% reduction in symptoms can still leave one depressed. Moreover, the article fails to disclose if there was a control group and if the study has been published in a peer reviewed journal. I also wonder how many of those involved in the study had received effective treatments properly delivered by a practitioner skilled in the modality prior to their enrollment. We know they received prior treatment but was it delivered in such a manner that could be effective? Could it be that the DBS subjects benefited solely from the attention they received immediately prior to the DBS insertion and throughout the study?

I continue to hope that reporters will evidence just tad of professional skepticism when covering "new treatments" where they might only represent putative progress. The mental health system seems to lack any institutional memory as do so many of those who cover it. The potentially hopeful part is covered, ex. Zyprexa, but the ultimate reality receives considerably less attention.

I’m sorry I didn’t have the opportunity to respond sooner but I truly sit here in amazement reading once again what I refer to as sensationalist media reporting demonstrating the lack on the part of the correspondent to initiate any in depth investigation of what it is she’s reporting about. Once again, I think of this kind of reporting as simply a means of filling space in some publication or media airtime.

“Deep brain stimulation requires minimally invasive surgery…”

Obviously this reporter has no concept of the deaths that do take place let alone from elective cosmetic surgeries not to count the rate of infections and complications and death from all types of surgeries. The reporter also flippantly omitted the need for several incisions such as the electrode placements in the brain and the pulse generator normally implanted in the abdomen. Needless to say this reporter also never bothered to investigate the complications and side-effects experienced by the Parkinson’s patients utilizing DBS.

It saddens me to read similar garbage presented by other journalists too lazy or whatever to present detailed and informative pieces although amongst other avenues I am very much in favor of the research taking place into innovative neuro-modulation therapy as a potential therapy choice for the MDD patient who has suffered severe chronic and recurrent depression.

What is important from my perspective is any therapy that has the potential to benefit this hardcore group of difficult to treat patient population and the longer-term response that overrides the “placebo effect” contradicting one of the respondents to this forum as noted in the quotation cited from the article and listed below:

“Six months later, 47.1 percent had at least a 50 percent reduction in their depressive symptoms, based on a commonly used depression scale. At one year, that number was 50 percent.”

Conventional therapies used to treat my spouse after some 4 decades simply did not cut the mustard while a relatively newer neuro-modulation therapy has.

Warmly,
Herb
VNSdepression.com

They're implanted pacemakers out there with faulty leads that can kill as many heart patients as they save.

Now they want to implant devices into the brain.