HEALTH ISSUE: POWER DOSE

      Stimulating brain

can help drive

 away the blues

London: A daily dose of electricity delivered to a specific part of the brain can lift depression, new research confirms, even for people who've already fried multiple antidepressants to no avail.

          While there's evidence that this technique, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), helps depressed people get better-and the US Food and Drug Administration has approved TMS for this prupo9se-many skeptics have questioned whether it really works, notes Mark George of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, the lead author of the new study.

         The biggest issue with studies so far, be explained, has been that it's tough to fake the sound and sensation of the real device in order to run a gold standard clinical trial in which some people get the treatment, and others get a sham treatment, no one knowing which.

         But George and his team say they've solved that problem by developing a dummy device that clicks, in a similar way person's eye muscles to twitch, just like real a TMS device.

         In Archives of General Psychiatry, George and his colleagues report the results of their 190-patient study, the most rigorous investigation of TMS for depression so far. They randomly assigned people to receive 37.5 minutes of TMS delivered to a part of the brain region  that plays a role in emotion, or 37.5 minutes of sham TMS, once a day for three weeks.

        After three weeks, 14% of patients in the real TMS group had recovered from their depression, compared to 5% of the sham TMS group; people who had the real treatment were four times as likely to get better as those who got the fake one. Based on the results, George says, it would be necessary to treat 12 depressed patients with TMS in order to have one patient recover.

        In a second phase of the study, all patients were given the real TMS treatment. Thirty per cent of the patients in the second phase recovered from depression. How long the treatment should last is not yet clear. "It looks as if from this trial you at least need to try three weeks and maybe even six weeks before you would give up, " George said.