When someone is struggling with a mood disorder like depression, the traditional approach employs a combination of talk therapy and medication. This front line of treatment is effective for many patients, but there are disadvantages to consider. Many medications come with undesirable side effects that can impact your quality of life, and some people have…
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS, is one of the newer ways to treat mental illnesses, especially major depression. All the data so far has indicated a safe, effective and non-invasive treatment for depression with little to no adverse side effects. As with all new treatments, patients might worry whether the results — no matter how promising they may…
TMS in Pregnancy – A pregnant woman with depression is in a difficult situation. In order to manage the depression, she might require antidepressant medication; however, seeing as the medication not only affects her but also the developing fetus, she may prefer to avoid medication. But if the depression goes untreated this will likely result…
TMS NYC TMS for Adolescents TMS NYC – Antidepressant medication does not work for everyone. Individuals with treatment resistant depression (TRD) often fail to see any improvement in symptoms. Or, if symptoms do improve, they may return soon afterward. Largely for these reasons there is a serious need for additional treatment options. Research in this…
Last year the FDA authorized the marketing of TMS to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This came as good news for patients with more refractory OCD who have not responded to traditional approaches (i.e. medication and/or psychotherapy). At the same time, it remains to be determined what brain areas to target in OCD and which TMS treatment…
Research into optimal TMS treatment parameters for a given disorder is ongoing. The paper we will consider here, by Kozel and colleagues, looks at frequency of pulse delivery, specifically low versus high frequency TMS in the treatment of PTSD. The effect TMS has on the brain is contingent upon many factors – frequency being one of them. Broadly speaking, TMS is…
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…
The initial response to the question – What effect does transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) have on cognitive performance? – was that TMS would cause neurons to fire at random, disrupting normal cognitive function. So, when reports started cropping up suggesting that TMS improves cognitive performance, both researchers and clinicians alike were quite taken aback. In…
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…
Since the early 1990s, the United States has been stricken with a methamphetamine epidemic. Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) reveals that during 2016 the prevalence of methamphetamine among people ages 12 or older was 0.5 percent. This means approximately 1.5 million people ages 12 or older used methamphetamine in…