My biggest question is probably what the distribution looks like for people who get TMS for depression—how many of them are “cured” in the sense that they never need TMS again? How many need it again after a year? Two years? And so on.
Took me a while to get back to this question. I didn’t know the answer so I looked up some papers. The short answer is, knowing this requires long follow-up periods which studies are generally not good at so we don’t have great answers. Definitely a significant number of people don’t stay better.
The longer answer is, probably about half of people need some form of maintenance treatment to stay non-depressed for more than a year, but our view of this is very confounded. Some studies have used normal antidepressant medications for maintenance, and some studies have tried additional rounds of TMS, both of which work really well. Up to a third of patients experience “symptom worsening” meaning that after an initial improvement from TMS, their symptoms actually get worse than when they started, but apparently more TMS can fix this in most people? I wasn’t completely sure what they were saying here. So yeah, it isn’t great. A lot of people need maintenance of some kind. This could very well correlate with whether your depression is the “life circumstances” kind or the “intrinsic brain chemistry” kind, not that we have a great handle on differentiating those two either.
Furthermore, (1) there are a few modes of TMS therapy out there, including most notably the accelerated course, and there may be different relapse rates across these treatment modes. There is some handwaving that the accelerated course may be more effective in this regard but I don’t think we know yet. And (2) another important issue with interpreting these data is that many of the studies are done on people who are treatment resistant, such as yourself. It’s unclear how much the results translate to the general population of depressed people.
Overall this is probably not a very satisfying answer, I don’t really have the specialist inside view on this one.
FYI the most targeted paper I found on this topic is the citation below. Note that it’s from 2016. There is probably something more recent, I just didn’t have more time to dig.
Sackeim, H. A. (2016). Acute continuation and maintenance treatment of major depressive episodes with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Brain Stimulation: Basic, Translational, and Clinical Research in Neuromodulation, 9(3), 313-319.
That’s awesome that you’re doing that research!
My biggest question is probably what the distribution looks like for people who get TMS for depression—how many of them are “cured” in the sense that they never need TMS again? How many need it again after a year? Two years? And so on.
Took me a while to get back to this question. I didn’t know the answer so I looked up some papers. The short answer is, knowing this requires long follow-up periods which studies are generally not good at so we don’t have great answers. Definitely a significant number of people don’t stay better.
The longer answer is, probably about half of people need some form of maintenance treatment to stay non-depressed for more than a year, but our view of this is very confounded. Some studies have used normal antidepressant medications for maintenance, and some studies have tried additional rounds of TMS, both of which work really well. Up to a third of patients experience “symptom worsening” meaning that after an initial improvement from TMS, their symptoms actually get worse than when they started, but apparently more TMS can fix this in most people? I wasn’t completely sure what they were saying here. So yeah, it isn’t great. A lot of people need maintenance of some kind. This could very well correlate with whether your depression is the “life circumstances” kind or the “intrinsic brain chemistry” kind, not that we have a great handle on differentiating those two either.
Furthermore, (1) there are a few modes of TMS therapy out there, including most notably the accelerated course, and there may be different relapse rates across these treatment modes. There is some handwaving that the accelerated course may be more effective in this regard but I don’t think we know yet. And (2) another important issue with interpreting these data is that many of the studies are done on people who are treatment resistant, such as yourself. It’s unclear how much the results translate to the general population of depressed people.
Overall this is probably not a very satisfying answer, I don’t really have the specialist inside view on this one.
FYI the most targeted paper I found on this topic is the citation below. Note that it’s from 2016. There is probably something more recent, I just didn’t have more time to dig.
Sackeim, H. A. (2016). Acute continuation and maintenance treatment of major depressive episodes with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Brain Stimulation: Basic, Translational, and Clinical Research in Neuromodulation, 9(3), 313-319.