FDA OKs Brain Pacemaker for Depression

Duke Machesne writes "On Friday, the FDA approved a new therapy for the severely depressed who have run out of treatment options: a pacemaker-like implant that sends tiny electric shocks to the brain. The Food and Drug Administration's clearance opens Cyberonics Inc.'s vagus nerve stimulator, or VNS, as a potential treatment for an estimated 4 million Americans with hard-to-treat depression - despite controversy over whether it's really been proven to work."

Comments

Similar to Parkinson's?

[Trixter]

First post! (Always wanted to say that) But in reality, isn't this the same treatment for severe cases of Parkinson's? Have those patients shown mood changes as well?

Re:Similar to Parkinson's?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I remember of my University psychology course, ECT was originally used to treat schizophrenia by inducing an epileptic seizure after it was noticed that schizophrenia and epilepsy seldom occured in the same patients.

ECT has subsequently been used as a last ditch treatment for severe, otherwise untreatable depression. It's so effective that patients often want to undergo the same treatment if their depression returns.

Oh wow

[DrMrLordX]

Imagine if someone with one of these devices stands downwind of the military's (relatively) new microwave riot-control gun. Woooeee. Should be interesting. Of course, I guess that applies to traditional cardiac pacemakers as well. Best not riot, Mr. Cheney.

Zap, wow that feels good.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it cures depression, what is stopping it from doing the opposite. Could this be a new friendly "happy" drug?

What could possibly go wrong with this?

[Mister Transistor]

For the answer, read or watch Michael Crichton's "The Terminal Man". One of his better stories, from about 30 years ago.

The end of Social Justice?

[LionKimbro]

Theory: Many instances of depression are due to social injustice, apathy, the slow pace at which society reforms itself.

Concern: If we drug or electrically stimulate ourselves to keep ourselves happy, social progress comes to a halt. We feel good about ourselves, even though horrible things happen around us.

Here is a bibliography kept by AdBusters. I'm not sure how reliable a bibliography kept by AdBusters is, but these are things that we should be thinking about, and research that we should at least consider.

Re:The end of Social Justice?

[Anonymous Coward]

We feel good about ourselves, even though horrible things happen around us.

I don't think you have an accurate depiction of exactly what depression is. I've suffered serious depression since I was a young kid. I grew up middle-class in a great family and was blessed with intelligence, great health, and decent looks

Yet, despite all this I struggle through most days just trying to maintain an normal life. It's only through determined effort that I'm able to allow some of my talents and personality make it into the world, but they are often held back. Multiply my case by millions and you have very real impediment to social progress.

Depression is a very serious thing and I guarantee you that more people truly suffer from it than you might think. Finding a solution isn't ignoring reality, which can sometimes be ugly. Instead it's managing a way to face that reality with your full potential, and anything that leads to that, in my opinion, is progress.

Re:The end of Social Justice?

[beeplet]

Many instances of depression are due to social injustice, apathy, the slow pace at which society reforms itself.

That may be true. However, I think it is still possible to distinguish between the depression which is a normal response to a poor environment, and pathological depression that needs treatment. It's like many other psychological responses that probably evolved because they were useful and healthy in certain situations, but can become unhealthy when the effect is disproportionate to the cause.

Depression, for example, might have evolved as a way for animals to deal with conflict. If a wolf loses a battle for dominance it becomes withdrawn temporarily - a kind of depression. In this case it is better for the animal to withdraw and live than continue to challenge and be killed. But if depression continues to the point where someone takes his own life, it's a natural response gone off the rails.

I've also read that people who are depressed are often more realistic when it comes to assessing their environment - people who aren't depressed tend to be overly optimistic. But I don't think there is really much danger in prescribing anti-depressants. If anything, if you want social change, a populace that is worn down and apathetic is least likely to put in the effort required. So I think it works both ways.

Re:The end of Social Justice?

[div_2n]

I find this theory to be extremely lacking. People don't think this way when it comes to treatments for heart disease, diabetes and things like that. Sure, some people should exercise more and lose weight to address their health issues, but there are some people that live unbelievably healthy lifestyles and still suffer from those type of ailments. Their bodies just don't respond to stimulus the right way.

I do not know why people insist the brain is any different just because we "think" with it. There is no reason to expect that the brain has some special property about it whereby it is incapable of a fundamental structural physiological problem that can manifest itself in negative ways such as depression. Just as someone who is born full blown type 1 diabetic could never produce insulin without some type of surgical intervention, it is logical to expect that there are people born with physical problems with their brain that will prevent them from ever being completely normal regardless of how much of a mental effort they put forth.

Just my $0.02.

Re:The end of Social Justice?

[Heisenbug]

Well ... in all fairness, severe clinical depression is very much on the rise. It must be caused by *something*.

There's really not much difference between your mind and your brain. It doesn't have to be unrelated to your social environment just because it's very much a physical illness.

Re:I want my tasp! uh Larry Niven reference

[Fox_1]

Wuhoo! Now I can be a wirehead with FDA approval. Why is this Flamebait? My first thought too was of Gil Hamilton's old crew mate's face grinning at him with a wire running from his skull to the wall. Belter tan and all.

Re:Welcome to the Monkey House

[TrippTDF]

I kinda agree with you here.

I'm a depressed person. While I've not been officially diagnosed, I think the recent suicide attempts have proven that.

Now, I don't fucking want help. I rather like being this far below the average person. It's easier down here. No one understands that, and I'm expected to "get better" so that my friends and family will "feel better" about me.

Why does depression have to be cured?

Re:don't they listen to tom cruise

[venicebeach]

Well, Tom Cruise is not entirely incorrect (although he's certainly insensitive, and somewhat insane).

The idea of depression being "due to a problem with the brain" is something of a misconception; of course it is one that has been promoted and reenforced by pharmaeutical companies.

Any mental state has a corresponding underlying physiology, but it really isn't correct to say one causes the other - to say the physiological state of the brain "causes" depression. Certainly when people become depressed that is associated with chemical changes in brain function. But cognitive behavioral therapy is (in most cases) as successful as drug treatment, and best results are when you use both. In other words, depression is cured by either changing thought patterns or by changing the chemical physiology of the brain, but really these two things are just two sides of the same coin.

To say that depression is a simply physiological disorder is misleading at best. Since all mental function is grounded in the biology of the brain, any mental state can be affected through a physical intervention, but that doesn't mean the state is "purely biological" or "caused" by brain function. For example, neuroimaging studies have shown that some of the abnormal patterns of brain activation you see in obsessive compulsive disorder change as a result of cognitive-behavioral therapy, that is, changing thoughts and behavior without drugs.

Re:Shockings will continue...

[mog007]

This sounds ominous, like the plot from a book I read a few months ago called The Terminal Man. Same author who did Sphere, but it was about a guy who got an implant to help him battle severe seizures that caused him to kill somebody. Eventually he trained himself to make the seizures happen at will, and caused a brief stimulation of his pleasure centers.

He broke out of the hospital and went on a kill rampage because the shocks started becoming too frequant for the implant to work, so he'd cause a seizure that wouldn't get counteracted by the implant. Was a cool story.

Re:Hack it and keep high forever

[Dun Malg]

I wonder how hackable they would be to send 'pleasure' signals... Kinda like a star trekkie thing that keeps your brain in extacy for hours upon hours... That would be the life... who cares about money after that implant.

Wouldn't work. Our brains don't measure things from a zero baseline, they do comparisons. Things like "fun", "pleasure", and even "pain" exist only as their requisite stimuli diverge from a running average baseline. In other words, constant stimulation of the pleasure center would fairly quickly become the new baseline, thus essentially rendering direct stimulation of the pleasure center "normal", and anything less than that "unpleasant".

Re:What about the rest of us?

[Achoi77]

A few years ago one of my friends (who was a med student at the time) was talking about the effects of heroin. He started talking about some experiment (this is a paraphrase, don't quote me on this) where they hooked up some device that connected to the part of the mouse brain that is associated with pleasure. That device was triggered by a switch, to which the mouse could press down on. Whenever the mouse pressed down on the switch, the device would send a little jolt? signal? something to the 'pleasure zone' of the brain, and the mouse would the effects of something apparently similar to the taking a shot of heroin.

At first the mouse would stumble upon it, and *whoops* it got high by accident. Eventually it figured out whenever it pressed the button, it would get high. More and more the mouse would hit the trigger to get high. Eventually the mouse was so severely addicted, it died of starvation as it was violently slamming the button trying to get it's 'fix,' the mouse forgot to eat. (please excuse my grammar)

No idea why this little story came up, I didn't really read your post too thoroughly, and I was thinking about if they did create an Orgasm-on-demand button, how many people would die with wide grins on their faces. I suppose this topic brought up the idea of an addiction. The reason why my friend was trying to tell me that story was because I was trying to quit smoking, and he was talking about how other addictions are far worse than smoking (like heroin), and that smoking is a relatively lighter addiction to control. A pretty clinically sadistic pep talk, that's for sure. :-) And yeah, I quit smoking.

Comparisons

[DynaSoar]

All the SF reference compared with this are wrong.

All the comparisons about deep brain stim, anti-ictal stim, TENS, etc., are wrong. They're similar in that electricity is used. It's different according to the voltage, freqency and placement.

As for the invasiveness of them (except TENS), that's not good, but we're working on it. If we can get TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) to focus down small enough, get a more portable power supply, and get a probe that's significantly smaller than the present ping pong paddle sized device, we'll have a definite improvement over the best available now.