DALLAS: How they cradled fellow soldiers and sailors as they died. Or detonated explosives in areas where innocent youngsters lived, then collected bodies in the aftermath – sometimes of children the same age as their own.
One by one, the memories came tumbling out, day after day, in 40-minute sessions. Dr. Serina Neumann, a psychologist and researcher at Eastern Virginia Medical School, listened and counseled. But she also treated the veterans, as they were talking, with a procedure that stimulated nerve cells in their brains that control depression and anxiety.
Nine veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder received the treatment, called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, while recalling their most tortured memories. All nine felt less anxiety after the treatments; some were calm enough to recall even more detail.
The technique, since gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 2008 to treat medicine-resistant depression, has spread.
The EVMS team’s work explores using it for other diagnoses. Later this month, the study, which started in 2014 and finished in 2015, will be presented to the Uniformed Services University Of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., in hopes that the federally run facility will consider expanding it to include veterans at various sites throughout the country. This would allow for a randomized study with a control group, considered the gold standard for evaluating effectiveness.
Neumann and psychiatrist Dr. Paul Sayegh are co-directors of the Therapeutic Brain Stimulation Program at EVMS and have been using the procedure since 2010.
The technology is like that of an MRI. An electromagnetic coil placed against the scalp delivers a painless pulse that travels through the skull to stimulate nerve cells in the cerebral cortex. The patient is seated in what resembles a dentist chair, and no anesthesia is required.
In people with resistant forms of depression that keep them from even getting out of bed in the morning, an area of the brain is stimulated to motivate them from their stupor. In patients whose brains may be overactive, causing high levels of anxiety, stimulation to a different part of the brain has a calming effect.
In the case of the veteran PTSD study, researchers thought that if the patients recited their most traumatic memories, it would trigger anxiety and allow the researchers to reduce that brain activity with the magnetic pulses.
“The neurons are overfiring, so we want to slow that down,” Neumann said…..