Some medical experiments are more daunting than others. The one that neurologist Helen Mayberg came up with to test a model of depression she had developed over about 15 years involved drilling two holes in the top of a patient’s skull and sliding two low-voltage electrodes deep into the brain until they reached a region known as Brodmann area 25. In a pair of pale pink curves of neural flesh called the subcollasal cingulate, each about the size and shape of a newborn’s crooked finger, area 25 occupies the fingertips. Once in place, the electrodes were wired to a battery pack implanted in the patient’s chest and turned on.

Between 2003 and 2006, first at the University of Toronto and then Emory University in Atlanta, Mayberg tried this experimental surgery, called deep brain stimulation (DBS), on 20 people who had been torturously depressed for years despite trying every other possible treatment. Area 25, she believed, was a neural junction box that became hyperactive in depressed people. She designed the experiment to see if the thrum of these DBS devices would calm area 25 and relieve their despair. In 2005 she published results from the first six patients, who’d done amazingly well; the other 14 later showed similar progress. Most cut their depression scores by around half. Over a third left their depression behind entirely.

… continue reading “What can we learn when a clinical trial is stopped?”

Image: By Dr. Craig Hacking, A. Prof Frank Gaillard – http://radiopaedia.org/articles/deep-brain-stimulation, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48376692

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