If you’re living with depression, you’ve likely noticed an impact on your quality of life. Symptoms such as mood swings, hopelessness and apathy make it challenging to achieve daily tasks and maintain personal connections. For some people, depression makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning, impacting their work, school and social…
The earliest accounts of depression were recorded in the second millennium BC in ancient Mesopotamia. However, the true nature of depressions eluded many scholars for a great number of years. But as medical science evolved a myriad set of treatments emerged. The treatments of past, from bloodletting, baths, and even local shamans, have all but…
Of all the people that experience a major depressive episode for the first time, depression will recur in about half of them. Several years may pass before the depression recurs or it may come back in as little as a couple of weeks. Depression may recur only once or multiple times over the course of…
Around the time transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was approved by the FDA in 2008, a few studies published findings concerning which individual patient characteristics might be associated with a robust antidepressant response to TMS. One such study (Fregni et al.) found that age was a statistically significant variable; that TMS produces a greater antidepressant effect…
Historical Overview of TMS for Treatment-Resistant Depression An aspiring artist who apprenticed as a barber and then as a cobbler, Santiago Ramón y Cajal went on to become a world-class anatomist. In 1906, Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his drawings of the neuron—spiny, arborous structures that conduct electrical impulses across…