mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== The Boston Globe Early McLean tests show brain scan eases depression By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff, 1/1/2004 McLean Hospital researchers have stumbled upon a possible new treatment for depression, finding that performing a novel type of brain scan on bipolar patients can quickly and significantly lift a patient's mood, apparently because the scanner's unusual magnetic fields affect the electrical workings of their brains. The findings are highly preliminary, but they are prompting an attempt at the Belmont psychiatric hospital to develop a tabletop antidepression device, one far smaller and cheaper than the magnetic resonance imaging machines that hospitals use for scanning. "The brain is an electrochemical organ, and we've always been working with it chemically to treat illnesses," said Dr. Bruce Cohen, president and psychiatrist-in-chief of McLean. "Working with it magnetically is very exciting: It may sound like science fiction, but it really makes good sense that you can change its activity and push people out of depression." The study, published in the Jan. 1 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, examined 30 bipolar, or manic-depressive, patients whose brains were scanned using Echo-Planar Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging, a method that can analyze the chemistry in small sections of the brain. It found that 23 of the bipolar patients reported a lift in mood after being scanned. Of the 11 patients who were not on medications, all 11 reported that scanning improved their mood. The study began by accident, when a research assistant noticed that bipolar patients being scanned for other studies came out of the machine in far better moods than when they went in. That occurred about three years ago, said Aimee Parow, the assistant, who is now a 27-year-old medical student in New York. One afternoon, she recalled, a patient came in who was so depressed she would barely answer questions. After her 20-minute scan, she emerged feeling so much better that she demanded, astonished, "What happened? What did you do?" Then a second patient, also with severe, intractable depression, came out of the scanner "and she was laughing and joking with me, which was completely out of character," Parow recalled. The next day, she approached Dr. Perry Renshaw, director of McLean's Brain Imaging Center, and told him she had observed something "really weird." The mood-lifting effect on those patients lasted weeks, said Renshaw, who is senior author on the paper. "This was a completely surprising finding," he said. "The goal of the original research study was to study changes in brain chemistry in people with bipolar disorder. We were just using a scanner as a tool to map brain chemistry." Then the two consecutive depressed subjects came out of the scanner saying "they were cured. It's an amazing story." Magnetic fields have shown some promise for treating depression. Studies have found that supermagnets held near the skull in a relatively new technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation relieve depression in some patients. Clinics in Europe and Canada offer it as therapy. So "it's not completely out of the realm of possibility that magnetic fields, delivered in a different way, could still have this effect, and an MRI system is certainly a safe way to deliver a magnetic field," said Dr. Stephen M. Strakowski, director of the Center for Imaging Research at the University of Cincinnati. He is a scanning specialist not involved in the McLean work. Asked about the McLean study, he warned, "I think we have to be very cautious, because there's a whole myriad of reasons why people might feel better, from participating in an MRI study to helping others with bipolar disorder." Studies have found a large placebo effect among subjects in clinical trials of depression treatments. The McLean study used the same kind of MRI scanner that hospitals use, but adapted it to a different, high-speed technique, like the "functional" scanners that researchers in increasing numbers are using to watch the brain at work. One goal of publishing the study, Renshaw said, was to "raise a flag that perhaps we should carefully and thoughtfully address what this kind of magnetic stimulation on the brain may be doing." Most researchers are convinced that functional scanning is completely noninvasive and harmless. But "once you find one effect caused by a scanner, maybe there might be others, and perhaps they'd be beneficial, perhaps they wouldn't," Renshaw said. The McLean team speculates that the magnetic pulse they happened to use somehow "matches the natural firing rhythm of brain cells," according to a McLean press release quoting researcher Michael Rohan, an imaging physicist. The study showed little mood-lifting effect on healthy subjects. It also checked the results against subjects who were given "sham" scans. Three of 10 patients who received phony scans reported feeling better. The McLean team has also filed for a patent on the potential uses of their brand of magnetic therapy. But, Renshaw said, "We're very far away from making any claims that this is anything other than an interesting observation." It is also not clear how much such a machine would cost to use. "In the best possible outcome," Renshaw said, "this becomes a less costly, less invasive way to provide therapy, but that involves a whole lot of conjecture and is way down the road." Carey Goldberg can be reached at © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.