UT was one of four sites selected for a $11.6 million nationwide clinical trial funded by the Department of Defense. The study seeks to determine whether a brain stimulation therapy can alleviate postpartum depression, according to a Feb. 5 UT news release.
“In the lives of women, there’s no time when they’re more susceptible to experiencing an episode of depression than during the postpartum period,” said D. Jeffrey Newport, professor and principal investigator for the study at Dell Medical School.
Newport said the trial will use a “transcranial magnetic stimulation,” a non-invasive brain stimulation method dating back to the 1990s. A magnet is positioned on the skull, and the magnetic field it generates stimulates a region of the brain, he said.
Participants will come in for five days and receive 10 treatments daily, lasting 10 minutes each with 50-minute breaks in between, Newport said. Earlier, people would need to receive TMS treatment for at least four weeks, he said.
“That’s a tremendous burden on people to travel into a center every day for a month,” Newport said. “Within the past few years, a group at Stanford developed a revised approach to using TMS.”
This approach, Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy, is a brain stimulation therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat major depressive disorder.
Postpartum depression symptoms are similar to major depressive disorder, including profound sadness and a lack of appetite, energy or interest, said Melissa Bentley, support coordinator manager for Postpartum Support International. She said they are differentiated by the onset, or when symptoms first appear.
It is a “randomized clinical trial,” Newport said, where half of the participants will receive the active TMS treatment while a “sham TMS,” which mimics the treatment’s sound and look, is used on the other half for a week without patient’s knowledge, creating a placebo effect. He said any patients who do not show improvements in the first week will get a second week with active TMS treatment. Researchers will conduct six months of follow-up after the treatment.
“Everyone who decides to enroll in the study and participate is certain that they will get, at a minimum, one week of treatment with this device,” Newport said.
Achal Singh Achrol, chief medical officer at Magnus Medical, the institute leading the trial, said in prior studies on treatment-resistant depression, 79% of patients experienced remission, or a decrease in symptoms. He said many of these patients had not experienced remission for more than a decade.
“There is this sort of difference in that disease, where people languish for some time,” Achrol said. “Many of them will do this treatment, and they’ll feel a sense of anger: ‘Why wasn’t I offered this sooner?’ Or, ‘I could have gotten my life back years ago.’”
The timing is different with postpartum depression, Achrol said, because people go from being well to sick quickly. Not only can patients not wait for medication, their medication could be exposed to their baby through breastfeeding.
“Every week matters to you in the moments that you’re in with your baby,” Achrol said. “There’s a real sense of urgency to try to do something now, quickly that could work on a rapid time course that is a non-drug solution.”
