Whether you’re dealing with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), treatment options can be challenging — it takes time for medications to kick in, and finding the right combination of therapies can be a lengthy process. Making matters more complex, many people don’t respond well to medications — 30% of people with depression have treatment-resistant depression.
What all of this means is that, months and even years later, many people still find themselves struggling with their mental health, and they’re no closer to a solution than the day they began looking.
This hurdle is one of the big reasons why Dr. Diana Ghelber and the team encourage our patients to try alternative treatment avenues, namely deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
For years, we have used TMS with great success and our enviable results are mirrored by ongoing studies. In fact, we want to highlight a recent study on how using accelerated deep rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) as an early treatment for OCD or depression can help people break free from these all-encompassing conditions more quickly. Let’s take a look.
Mental health issues like depression and anxiety are on the rise — for example, 29% of adults in the United States report experiencing depression at some point in their lives, which is up by 10% from 2015. While much less common, the lifetime prevalence of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) among adults in the US is still 2.3%.
For decades, the frontline treatment for these conditions has been a combination of medications, such as antidepressants, and psychotherapy. Even when these treatments are successful, they take a good deal of time, especially when it comes to getting the medications right. And they’re often not successful in the end, leaving patients frustrated and seemingly without options.
We want you to know that there is another way — one that works quickly and has far fewer side effects — TMS. This innovative approach to mental health relies on using magnetic impulses to modulate dysfunctional neural networks in your brain.
After rigorous clinical trials, the FDA has jumped on board and recognized the efficacy of TMS and approved it for depression in 2013 and OCD in 2018.
Now let’s get to that study we referenced, which includes 391 patients with depression and 239 patients with OCD.
The patients with depression underwent 6 days of repetitive deep TMS while patients with OCD underwent 10 days of intensive and consecutive deep rTMS treatments.
At the end of these short periods, the study reported response rates of nearly 61% of participants with depression and nearly 63% in patients with OCD.
Not only did the accelerated deep rTMS treatments work quickly for a majority of patients, researchers also concluded that patients tolerated the treatments very well and there were very few side effects (a temporary headache was the most common).
Studies like this confirm what we already know: TMS works quickly and safely in improving brain function to help patients get out from conditions like depression and OCD.
If you’d like to stop the downward spiral of your depression or OCD with TMS, please contact our office in Fort Worth, Texas, today to schedule an appointment. The sooner we can get to work, the sooner we’ll be able to find happiness and freedom again.
