TMS Treatment for Depression

Doctor Abraham Zangen discusses how transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can stimulate different areas of the brain and treat depression.

We apply the stimulation in animal models in various brain sites that are associated with reward like the nucleus accumbens which is the ventral striatum, and the prefrontal cortex, the prelimbic and infralimbic cortex in the animal models. In the human studies we do only prefrontal cortex stimulation, but we are able to reach deep portions of this region with a special coil that we have designed to stimulate deeper portions of this area because we know that the deeper layers actually innervate heavily into other reward regions, and in our studies we found that stimulation of the deeper layers are much more effective in terms of ratings for depression of severely depressed patients. We find much better effects when we stimulate deeper.