New magnetic treatment offers hope for depression | Video

TMS therapy treatments help some with extreme depression.

Though depression is often dubbed the common cold of mental health, the disorder can be crippling and nearly a third of those who suffer find little or no relief in the flood of anti-depressants now on the market.

For them, a new but expensive treatment option may offer hope where everything else has failed. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, is an outpatient procedure during which magnetic pulses are focused on a part of the brain that becomes sluggish during depression.

In essence, the pulses speed things up.

"It saved my life," said Kelsey Pop, a psychiatric nurse in Orlando. At 29, she has suffered from major depression since she was a teenager including an acute episode last summer that landed her in the hospital for 11 days. "Over the years I saw psychologists and psychiatrists and therapists, I was put on a series of medications and I was hospitalized several times. Nothing else helped."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved TMS therapy for treating drug-resistant depression in 2008, but insurers have been slow to cover the procedure. In 2012, when Medicare began limited coverage, a handful of Central Florida providers including Florida Hospital and TMS Therapy Clinic of Orlando lined up to be ready for the expected increase of patients.

Nearly 10 percent of U.S. adults suffer some form of depression in a given year, and it remains the leading cause of disability for Americans age 15 to 44. The problem is more prevalent in women than men, but no demographic group is immune. Last month, popular WKMG-Channel 6 news anchor Lauren Rowe announced she had suffered depression for "many years" and needed to take a break to focus on treatment.

Though medications and talk therapy help about half of those diagnosed, for more than 30 percent, drugs prove ineffective. And the side effects can be severe, including fatigue; anxiety; weight gain; difficulty sleeping; sexual dysfunction; stomach and intestinal problems; and headaches.

"We've had patients come to us who recognize that they are depressed, but they're very anti-meds," said psychiatrist Luis Allen, medical director at Florida Hospital's Center for Behavioral Health, who considers TMS one of the biggest breakthroughs in treating depression in decades. "For them, they see this as a viable option, and it's one of the safest."

Pop had suffered profoundly at times dropping out of college at one point and attempting suicide. Some days she couldn't bring herself to get out of bed. Last year, she agreed to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (formerly known as electroshock), considered a treatment of last resort. But it not only failed to ease her depression, it also caused memory loss.

See the rest here:
New magnetic treatment offers hope for depression | Video