Electrical stimulation treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression

Electrical stimulation treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. Nature Sub-Journal: Electrical stimulation of the brain can save people suffering from mental illness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression.

Deep brain stimulation is a promising treatment for severe depression, but randomized trials lack efficacy.

After going out, I always feel that I forgot to lock the door, so I have to run back and have a look; I subconsciously look at my phone every few minutes for fear of missing messages; I am sleepy, but I always stay up late to play with my phone; I can’t bear to buy it because it’s useless.

Do these behaviors happen to you often? In fact, these are more typical obsessive-compulsive behaviors,

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

It is very common in the general population. Nearly one billion people worldwide suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder of varying degrees.
Severe obsessive-compulsive disorder is very harmful, because there are involuntary thoughts, or rigid etiquette or meaningless behavior repetition, which seriously affects the patient’s attention, as well as learning and work. In severe cases, it can completely lose the ability to learn and work, resulting in mental Disability. The patient is unable to get rid of it, causing great pain in the heart, but there are few effective treatment options for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
On January 18, 2021, Boston University researchers published a research paper titled: High-frequency neuromodulation improves obsessive–compulsive behavior in Nature Medicine.

Through non-invasive neuromodulation (such as transcranial alternating current stimulation, tACS), the intervention can be personalized according to the individual’s neurophysiological dynamics. There have been researches on the treatment of improving obsessive-compulsive behavior through such personalized interventions.

 
Previous studies have linked compulsive behavior with excessive habitual learning. Compulsive behavior is considered to be the result of excessive habitual learning. This is due to abnormalities in the frontal striatum leading to repeated execution of learning behaviors.

The research team used a noninvasive method to measure the brain activity patterns of 124 subjects participating in a reinforcement learning task. They stimulated a specific brain network in the orbitofrontal cortex with low-frequency currents, and found that this method can effectively regulate the selection behavior of reward guidance rather than punishment.

Low-frequency electrical stimulation that tunes the frequency to the brain network activity pattern that controls learning and reward choice behavior may reduce people’s compulsive behavior. The research team found that 5 days of chronic stimulation can reduce compulsive behavior for 3 months, and the subjects with the most severe symptoms improved the most.

The results of this study show that non-invasive, personalized brain circuit therapy has the potential to treat obsessive-compulsive behaviors and related symptoms. It also helps to further understand the neurophysiological theories of reward, learning and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

This new personalized brain regulation is expected to bring long-term benefits to patients suffering from alcoholism, forced eating, gambling, shopping and other behaviors.

In addition, this issue of Nature Medicine also published a study from the University of California, San Francisco entitled: State-dependent responses to intracranial brain stimulation in a patient with depression.

Deep brain stimulation is a promising treatment for severe depression, but randomized trials lack efficacy. The research team implanted multiple intracranial electrodes in patients with severe depression and systematically evaluated the acute response to focal electrical neuromodulation.

The results of the experiment found complex and unique emotional responses, which are effective, reproducible, and related to background and state. These research results provide a proof of concept for the treatment of depression and other neurological diseases through intracranial electrical stimulation.

(source:chinanet, reference only)

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