Magnetic Relief For Depression?

"Within two months, I was feeling so excited about life again," she said.

John O'Reardon, an associate professor of psychiatry who headed the Penn trial and treated Newman and Aguilar, argued, like Demitrack, that the results of the study were not equivocal: "The fact you are giving people a novel treatment gives them a lot of hope, and hope itself is an antidepressant," he said. "It would make a lot of sense to do a course of talk therapy or a course of generic antidepressants, but if that does not work, you need to look for alternatives."

"You are not getting memory problems like you get with ECT, and you are not getting weight gain or sexual side effects like you may get with medications," O'Reardon said. The dropout rate in the study was very low, which suggests the side effects of the therapy are minimal.

Aguilar said the treatment caused a tapping feeling on her head that was uncomfortable but something she got used to: "You jump a little before you start and then it goes dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit," she said. "It does not really hurt, but it makes you jump."

O'Reardon said that some of the discomfort arose because the magnetic field was setting off electrical currents in the scalp, causing the muscles to tighten.

Not a Panacea

Philip Janicak, a professor of psychiatry at Rush University in Chicago, who helped conduct the study, said the therapy added to physicians' armamentarium in treating depression.

"It is estimated 14 million patients will experience major depression annually," he said. "Half will be diagnosed, and only half of those will benefit from treatment. We clearly need other approaches to treat depression and need to improve safety and tolerability."

"Is it the new standard of treatment for depression that will replace all other treatments and resolve all the problems we have with depression? No, it is not," Janicak added. "We don't have a treatment like that yet."

With insurance unlikely to cover transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy right away, Janicak said a course of TMS treatment might run a patient $6,000 to $8,000.

Goodman, at the National Institute of Mental Health, said that in principle at least, magnetic therapy was appealing in that it appeared to have few side effects and could be highly targeted toward the brain, unlike a drug. The federal government is sponsoring a study into the therapy; this would provide independent and noncommercial data that Goodman said are essential for doctors making judgments about the utility and effectiveness of the procedure.

"It's attractive in that it is a relatively noninvasive and well-tolerated procedure," he said. "We have more to learn about the actual mechanism of action, which may tell us more about the underlying biology of depression. In addition to being a treatment, it may turn out to be a tool to understand depression."

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