Source: Paul, et al. 2024, Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice
New research has identified differing trends in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among adolescents and adults, including an increase among adults from 2020 to 2023. The study, published in the American Psychiatric Association Journal Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice, found a significant downward trends in ADHD incidence among adults from 2016 to 2020 and adolescents from 2016 to 2018. The ADHD incidence rate remained stable for adolescents in subsequent years.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder involving inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity that interferes with a person’s functioning and ability to perform daily activities, including at school or work. ADHD is often viewed as a condition primarily impacting childhood and adolescence; however, it can also affect adults. Research on the prevalence of ADHD in adults remains limited, with findings varying considerably.
The large retrospective cohort study, conducted by researchers at Saint Louis University and SSM Health, involved more than 140 000 adolescents and adult patients who used services with a large healthcare system located in four states. New ADHD diagnoses were identified using patient charts. Regression analysis was used to determine incidence rates and trends in ADHD diagnoses by age group.
They found a significant downward trend in ADHD incidence among adults from 2016 to 2020 and an upward trend from 2020 to 2023. Among adolescents, a significant downward trend was observed between 2016 and 2018, and the incidence rate remained stable between 2018 and 2023.
“Fluctuations in incidence rates are likely due to a complex interplay of various factors,” the authors write. For example, increased awareness and destigmatisation of ADHD can lead to more diagnoses. Changes in diagnostic criteria, such as the expansion of ADHD criteria in the DSM-5 compared to previous editions, may have contributed to an increase in diagnoses. Variations in diagnostic practices and assessment methods can contribute to differences in incidence rates. In addition, there are some indications, the authors note, that the COVID-19 pandemic may have contributed to new ADHD diagnoses and worsening symptoms.
The authors suggest that this research can support future efforts to identify modifiable risk factors, ensure sufficient treatment resources, develop targeted interventions, and address diagnostic disparities.
In a recent study published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, middle aged workers in the US who reported high job strain at the start of the study experienced significantly more sleep disturbances over an average follow-up of nine years.
The study analysed data from 1721 workers, with an average age of 51 years, who participated in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study. Sleep disturbances were assessed with an established scale, based on four sleep-related symptoms: trouble falling asleep, waking up during the night and having difficulty going back to sleep, waking up too early in the morning and being unable to get back to sleep, and feeling unrested during the day no matter how many hours of sleep.
The team used six different formulations to quantify job strain based on Karasek’s Job‐Demand‐Control model, which defines job strain as a combination of high job demand and low job control. All formulations showed significant associations between higher job strain at baseline and increased sleep disturbances over time.
“Our findings also suggest that the continuous formulations of job strain demonstrate better model performance with consistent and robust results, offering empirical evidence for future psychosocial occupational health research in the United States,” said the first author Yijia Sun, an MS candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Corresponding author Jian Li, MD, PhD, a professor of Work and Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, noted that there is an urgent need for workplace interventions to reduce stress. “Strategies such as redesigning workloads and promoting worker autonomy could play an important role in improving sleep health and workers’ well-being,” he said.
Could complex beliefs like paranoia have roots in something as basic as vision? A new Yale study finds evidence that they might.
When completing a visual perception task, in which participants had to identify whether one moving dot was chasing another moving dot, those with greater tendencies toward paranoid thinking (believing others intend them harm) and teleological thinking (ascribing excessive meaning and purpose to events) performed worse than their counterparts, the study found. Those individuals more often – and confidently – claimed one dot was chasing the other when it wasn’t.
The findings, published in the journal Communications Psychology, suggest that, in the future, testing for illnesses like schizophrenia could be done with a simple eye test.
“We’re really interested in how the mind is organised,” said senior author Philip Corlett, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and member of the Wu Tsai Institute. “Chasing or other intentional behaviours are what you might think of as experiences perceived at a very high-level in the brain, that someone might have to reason through and deliberate. In this study, we can see them low down in the brain, in vision, which we think is exciting and interesting – and has implications for how those mechanisms might be relevant for schizophrenia.”
Paranoia and teleological thinking are similar in that they are both misattributions of intention, but paranoia is a negative perception while teleological thinking tends to be positive. Both patterns of thinking are linked to psychosis and schizophrenia.
Hallucinations are associated with psychosis as well and are often about other people, said Corlett, suggesting there may be a social component to these visual misperceptions.
“So we wondered whether there might be something related to social perception – or misperception, what we refer to as social hallucination – that we could measure and that relate to these symptoms of psychosis,” he said.
For the task, participants were shown dots moving on a screen. Sometimes one dot was chasing another; other times there was no chase. Across different trials of the task, participants had to say whether a chase was occurring or not.
Those with higher degrees of paranoia and teleological thinking (as measured through questionnaires) were more likely than others to say with confidence that a chase was happening when one wasn’t. Essentially, they perceived a social interaction that wasn’t occurring.
In additional experiments, the researchers asked participants to identify which dot was doing the chasing and which dot was being chased. In these results, paranoia and teleological thinking began to diverge.
“People with paranoia were particularly bad at detecting which dot was being chased,” said Santiago Castiello, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in Corlett’s lab. “And people with high teleology were particularly bad at detecting which dot was doing the chasing.”
That these two types of beliefs differed in this way highlights that they are distinct and may have implications for diagnosis or treatment, said the researchers. The connection to vision may also shift thinking around how the brain gives rise to psychotic symptoms.
“Very few people with congenital blindness develop schizophrenia,” said Castiello. “Finding these social hallucinations in vision makes me wonder if schizophrenia is something that develops through errors in how people sample the visual world.”
While there are no immediate therapeutic implications from these findings, deeper understanding of these beliefs could aid in pharmacological treatment development and risk assessment.
“One thing we’re thinking about now is whether we can find eye tests that predict someone’s risk for psychosis,” said Corlett. “Maybe there is some very quick perceptual task that can identify when someone might need to talk to a clinician.”
People experienced less stress and anxiety while listening to nature soundscapes, but the addition of road traffic noise increased their stress and anxiety
Photo by Lucas Davies on Unsplash
Manmade sounds such vehicle traffic can mask the positive impact of nature soundscapes on people’s stress and anxiety, according to a new study published November 27, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Paul Lintott of the University of the West of England, U.K., and Lia Gilmour of the Bat Conservation Trust, U.K.
Existing research shows that natural sounds, like birdsong, can lower blood pressure, heart, and respiratory rates, as well as self-reported stress and anxiety. Conversely, anthropogenic soundscapes, like traffic or aircraft noise, are hypothesized to have negative effects on human health and wellbeing in a variety of ways.
In the new study, 68 student volunteers listened to three 3-minute soundscapes: a nature soundscape recorded at sunrise in West Sussex, U.K., the same soundscape combined with 20 mile per hour road traffic sounds, and the same soundscape with 40 mile per hour traffic sounds. General mood and anxiety were assessed before and after the soundscapes using self-reported scales.
The study found that listening to a natural soundscape reduced self-reported stress and anxiety levels, and also enhanced mood recovery after a stressor. However, the benefits of improved mood associated with the natural soundscape was limited when traffic sounds were included. The natural soundscape alone was associated with the lowest levels of stress and anxiety, with the highest levels reported after the soundscape that included 40 mile per hour traffic.
The authors conclude that reducing traffic speed in urban areas might influence human health and wellbeing not only through its safety impacts, but also through its effect on natural soundscapes.
The authors add: “Our study shows that listening to natural soundscapes can reduce stress and anxiety, and that anthropogenic sounds such as traffic noise can mask potential positive impacts. Reducing traffic speeds in cities is therefore an important step towards more people experiencing the positive effects of nature on their health and wellbeing.”
Photo by Inzmam Khan: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-black-shirt-and-gray-denim-pants-sitting-on-gray-padded-bench-1134204/
A study by researchers at the University of Helsinki and HUS Helsinki University Hospital found a significant association among adolescents between having psychotic-like experiences and depressive symptoms, as well as with self-destructive behaviours.
Psychotic-like experiences resemble symptoms of psychosis, but are milder, less frequent and much more common than psychotic disorders. While these symptoms do not constitute a disorder diagnosed as psychosis, they can still be disruptive, distressing or detrimental to functional capacity. Typical psychotic-like experiences include perceptual distortions and hallucinations, suspicious paranoid thinking, delusions and bizarre, unusual thoughts.
Psychotic-like experiences are abundant among adolescents referred to care, but are generally considered fairly neutral, with only some of the adolescents reporting them as frightening, worrisome or harmful. In the study, published in the journal Psychosis, the correlation between psychotic-like experiences and depressive symptoms turned out to be strong. This link was not explained by connections between individual psychotic-like experiences and depressive symptoms, but by factors that more broadly measure paranoia and unusual thoughts. In addition to depressive symptoms, paranoid thoughts and unusual thought content were also associated with self-destructive thinking.
Making questions about psychotic-like experiences part of care
The findings show that psychotic-like experiences should be systematically surveyed in all adolescents seeking psychiatric care. It should also be assessed how frightening, worrisome or harmful they are considered to be. Particularly in the case of responses emphasising bizarre thinking and exaggerated suspiciousness, attention should also be paid to assessing mood and self-destructive thinking, as these factors can remain hidden without further enquiry.
“Our findings provide a clear recommendation for treatment practices: psychotic-like experiences should be assessed as part of routine procedures, but it is also important to determine how they are perceived. These phenomena cannot be uncovered unless separately and systematically asked,” says the principal investigator, Docent Niklas Granö.
It should be clearly explained to adolescents and their families that these symptoms are common and often manageable. In addition, applications of cognitive psychotherapy, even brief interventions, can help adolescents understand their symptoms and alleviate the strain they cause.
This is a pseudo-coloured image of high-resolution gradient-echo MRI scan of a fixed cerebral hemisphere from a person with multiple sclerosis. Credit: Govind Bhagavatheeshwaran, Daniel Reich, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health
Fampridine is currently used to improve walking ability in multiple sclerosis. A new study shows that it could also help individuals with reduced working memory, as seen in mental health conditions like schizophrenia or depression.
Working memory allows a memory to be actively retained for a few seconds, for cognitive tasks such as remembering an email address to save it, or participating in a conversation. Certain conditions, such as schizophrenia or depression, as well as ADHD, impair working memory. Those affected lose track in conversations and struggle to organise their thoughts.
Fampridine is a drug that could help in such cases, as shown in a study led by Professors Andreas Papassotiropoulos and Dominique de Quervain at the University of Basel. The team has reported their findings in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
Effective only if working memory is poor
In their study, the researchers tested the effectiveness of fampridine on working memory in 43 healthy adults. It was in those participants whose baseline working memory was at a low level that fampridine showed a more pronounced effect: after taking the active substance for three days, they scored better in the relevant tests than those who took the placebo. In contrast, in people who already had good baseline working memory, the drug showed no effect.
The researchers also observed that fampridine increased brain excitability in all participants, thus enabling faster processing of stimuli. The study was randomized and double-blind.
Established drug, new application
“Fampridine doesn’t improve working memory in everyone. But it could be a treatment option for those with reduced working memory,” explains Andreas Papassotiropoulos. Dominique de Quervain adds: “That’s why, together with researchers from the University Psychiatric Clinics Basel (UPK), we’re planning studies to test the efficacy of fampridine in schizophrenia and depression.”
The drug is currently used to improve walking ability in multiple sclerosis (MS). Particularly in capsule form, which releases the active ingredient slowly in the body, fampridine has shown effects on cognitive performance in MS patients: for some, it alleviates the mental fatigue that can accompany MS.
The researchers did not select the drug at random: this study followed comprehensive analyses of genome data in order to find starting points for repurposing established drugs. Fampridine acts on specific ion channels in nerve cells that, according to the researchers’ analyses, also play a role in mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
Children whose mothers have taken antiseizure drugs during pregnancy are more likely than others to receive a neuropsychiatric diagnosis. This is according to a comprehensive study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and elsewhere, published in Nature Communications. However, the researchers emphasise that the absolute risk is low.
Antiseizure drugs are used to treat epilepsy and to stabilise mood in certain psychiatric conditions. However, some of these drugs, such as valproate, are known to affect the foetus if used during pregnancy.
The current study included data from over three million children in the UK and Sweden, 17 495 of whom had been exposed to antiseizure drugs during pregnancy.
As expected, children exposed to valproate were more likely to be diagnosed with autism, intellectual disability or ADHD compared to children not exposed to antiseizure drugs. Children exposed to topiramate had a 2.5-fold increased risk of intellectual disability, while those exposed to carbamazepine had a 25 per cent increased risk of being diagnosed with autism and a 30 per cent increased risk of intellectual disability.
No increased risk with lamotrigine
However, the researchers found no evidence that taking the antiseizure drug lamotrigine during pregnancy increases the risk of neuropsychiatric diagnoses in the child.
“Our findings suggest that while certain medications may pose some risk, lamotrigine may be a less risky option, but active monitoring of any antiseizure medication is critical to ensure safety and effectiveness, particularly during pregnancy,” says Brian K. Lee, Professor at Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, USA, and affiliated researcher at the Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden.
The researchers emphasise that the absolute risk of the child receiving a neuropsychiatric diagnosis is low and that there may also be risks associated with not taking antiseizure medication during pregnancy.
“If you’re pregnant or trying to become pregnant, and taking one of these medications, it may be worth talking with your physician to make sure you’re taking the best medicine for your needs, while minimising risk to future children,” says Viktor H. Ahlqvist, researcher at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and joint first author with Paul Madley-Dowd at the University of Bristol, UK.
The results support previous findings from smaller studies that found links between antiseizure drugs during pregnancy and the risk of neuropsychiatric diagnoses in the child. One difference is that the new study found no statistically significant association between topiramate or levetiracetam and ADHD in the child.
A study at the University of Jyväskylä showed that the heart rate variability of a dog and its owner adapt to each other during interaction. High heart rate variability is associated with relaxation, while low heart rate variability indicates stimulation. The study, published in Scientific Reports, deepens our understanding of the emotional connection between a dog and its owner, including its underlying physiological mechanisms.
Emotional connection enhances interaction in human relationships. Emotional synchronisation in the interaction between a child and a parent is essential for affective attachment. The relationship between a dog and its owner is also based on attachment, but little is known about its physiological mechanisms.
The heart rate variability of a dog and its owner adapt to each other
In a study conducted at the University of Jyväskylä, at the Department of Psychology and Jyväskylä Centre for Interdisciplinary Brain Research, it was found that the heart rate variability of a dog and its owner are interconnected during interaction. Heart rate variability, in other words, the variation in the heartbeat intervals, indicates the state of the autonomic nervous system. High heart rate variability is associated with a state of relaxation and recovery, while low heart rate variability indicates stimulation or strain, such as stress during an exam or sport performance. In this study, the owner’s high heart rate variability was connected to the dog’s high heart rate variability, and vice versa. In addition, the physical activity levels of a dog and its owner mutually adapted to each other during the study.
Different connections for activity and heart rate variability
The connections of heart rate variability and activity levels between a dog and its owner were monitored during specific interaction tasks. Both heart rate and activity level were interconnected between dogs and their owners, but at different times. During free-form resting periods, the owner’s high heart rate variability was connected to the dog’s high heart rate variability. In other words, when the owner was relaxed the dog was also relaxed. Moreover, the owner’s and dog’s activity levels were similar during the given tasks, such as playing. Although it is known that physical activity has an impact on heart rate, the strongest connections of these variables between dog and owner were found in different situations and do not fully explain each other. This suggests that the connection in heart rate variability reflects the synchrony of emotional state rather than of activity levels.
“The interconnection in heart rate variability between the dog and its owner during resting periods may be explained by the fact that in those instances there were no external tasks, but the counterparts could react more to each other’s state in a natural way,” says Doctoral Researcher Aija Koskela.
Owner’s temperament is connected to the dog’s heart rate variability
The study also investigated various background factors for the interconnection of the heart rate variability of the dog and its owner. Bigger dogs had higher heart rate variability. In addition, the dog’s high heart rate variability was also explained by the owner’s negative affectivity, a temperament trait that reflects the person’s tendency to become easily concerned about negative things. This type of owner tends to develop a strong emotional bond with the dog, and therefore the shepherd dogs of this study possibly had a higher sense of safety with these owners.
The dog also influences the owner
A surprising finding in the study was that the owner’s heart rate variability was best explained by the dog’s heart rate variability, even though also the owner’s activity level and body mass index, which are known to impact heart rate, were taken into account in the analysis.
“We exceptionally investigated both a dog’s and its owner’s heart rate and activity level simultaneously, whereas previous studies have commonly focused either on the human’s or the dog’s perspective,” says the leader of the study, Academy Research Fellow Miiamaaria Kujala. “The challenging research setting gives a better opportunity to investigate interactive aspects.”
This study indicates that the emotional states of dogs and their owners as well as the reactions of their nervous system become partially adapted to each other during interaction. The same mechanisms that strengthen human affective attachment also seem to support the relationship between a dog and its owner. This study deepens our understanding about interaction between species and about the meaning of emotional connection between dogs and humans.
Interaction research involved dogs bred for cooperation
The study was funded mainly by the Research Council of Finland and the Agria & Svenska Kennelklubben Research Fund. It involved altogether 30 voluntary dog owners with their dogs. The dogs represented breeds refined for cooperating with humans, such as sheep dogs and retrievers. The research findings are in line with previous studies, which have suggested that breeds selected for cooperation are particularly sensitive to react to their owners’ behaviour and personality traits. Next, the project will seek to shed light more specifically on the influential mechanisms involved in this phenomenon.
Patients who have had a heart attack are typically treated using beta blockers. According to a Swedish study conducted earlier this year, this drug is unlikely to be needed for those heart patients who have a normal pumping ability. Now a sub-study at Uppsala University shows that there is also a risk that these patients will become depressed by the treatment.
“We found that beta blockers led to slightly higher levels of depression symptoms in patients who had had a heart attack but were not suffering from heart failure. At the same time, beta blockers have no life-sustaining function for this group of patients,” says Philip Leissner, a doctoral student in cardiac psychology and the study’s first author. The study was published in European Heart Journal Acute Cardiovascular Care.
Beta blockers are drugs that block the effects of adrenaline on the heart and have been used for decades as a basic treatment for all heart attack patients. In recent years, their importance has started to be questioned as new, successful treatments have begun to be developed. This is mainly the case for heart attack patients who do not suffer from heart failure.
The researchers wanted to look at the side effects of beta blockers, that is, whether they affect anxiety and depression levels. This is because older research and clinical experience suggests that beta blockers are linked to negative side effects such as depression, difficulty sleeping and nightmares.
Earlier this year, a major national study was conducted in Sweden, which found that those who received beta-blocking drugs were not protected from relapse or death compared to those who did not receive the drug. Leissner and his colleagues based their research on these findings and conducted a sub-study. It ran from 2018 to 2023 and involved 806 patients who had had a heart attack but no problems with heart failure. Half were given beta blockers and the other half were not. About 100 of the patients receiving beta blockers had been taking them since before the study, and the researchers observed more severe symptoms of depression in them.
“Most doctors used to give beta blockers even to patients without heart failure, but as the evidence in favour of doing so is no longer so strong, this should be reconsidered. We could see that some of these patients appear to be more at risk of depression. If the drug doesn’t make a difference to their heart, then they are taking it unnecessarily and at risk of becoming depressed,” adds Leissner.
A type of therapy that involves applying a magnetic field to both sides of the brain has been shown to be effective at rapidly treating depression in patients for whom standard treatments have been ineffective.
Our accelerated approach means we can do all of the sessions in just five days, rapidly reducing an individual’s symptoms of depression
Valerie Voon
The treatment – known as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – involves placing an electromagnetic coil against the scalp to relay a high-frequency magnetic field to the brain.
Around one in 20 adults is estimated to suffer from depression. Although treatments exist, such as anti-depressant medication and cognitive behavioural therapy (‘talking therapy’), they are ineffective for just under one in three patients.
One of the key characteristics of depression is under-activity of some regions (such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and over-activity of others (such as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)).
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation applied to the left side of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (an area at the upper front area of the brain) is approved for treatment of depression in the UK by NICE and in the US by the FDA. It has previously been shown to lead to considerable improvements among patients after a course of 20 sessions, but because the sessions usually take place over 20-30 days, the treatment is not ideal for everyone, particularly in acute cases or where a person is suicidal.
In research published in Psychological Medicine, scientists from Cambridge, UK, and Guiyang, China, tested how effective an accelerated form of TMS is. In this approach, the treatment is given over 20 sessions, but with four sessions per day over a period of five consecutive days.
The researchers also tested a ‘dual’ approach, whereby a magnetic field was additionally applied to the right-hand side of the OFC (which sits below the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex).
Seventy-five patients were recruited to the trial from the Second People’s Hospital of Guizhou Province in China. The severity of their depression was measured on a scale known as the Hamilton Rating Scale of Depression.
Participants were split randomly into three groups: a ‘dual’ group receiving TMS applied first to the right- and then to the left-hand sides of the brain; a ‘single’ group receiving sham TMS to the right-side followed by active TMS applied to the left-side; and a control group receiving a sham treatment to both sides. Each session lasted in total 22 minutes.
There was a significant improvement in scores assessed immediately after the final treatment in the dual treatment group compared to the other two groups. When the researchers looked for clinically-relevant responses – that is, where an individual’s score fell by at least 50% – they found that almost half (48%) of the patients in the dual treatment group saw such a reduction, compared to just under one in five (18%) in the single treatment group and fewer than one in 20 (4%) in the control group.
Four weeks later, around six in 10 participants in both the dual and single treatment groups (61% and 59% respectively) showed clinically relevant responses, compared to just over one in five (22%) in the control group.
Professor Valerie Voon from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, who led the UK side of the study, said: “Our accelerated approach means we can do all of the sessions in just five days, rapidly reducing an individual’s symptoms of depression. This means it could be particularly useful in severe cases of depression, including when someone is experiencing suicidal thoughts. It may also help people be discharged from hospital more rapidly or even avoid admission in the first place.
“The treatment works faster because, by targeting two areas of the brain implicated in depression, we’re effectively correcting imbalances in two import processes, getting brain regions ‘talking’ to each other correctly.”
The treatment was most effective in those patients who at the start of the trial showed greater connectivity between the OFC and the thalamus (an area in the middle of the brain responsible for, among other things, regulation of consciousness, sleep, and alertness). The OFC is important for helping us make decisions, particularly in choosing rewards and avoiding punishment. Its over-activity in depression, particularly in relation to its role in anti-reward or punishment, might help explain why people with depression show a bias towards negative expectations and ruminations.
Dr Yanping Shu from the Guizhou Mental Health Centre, Guiyang, China, said: “This new treatment has demonstrated a more pronounced – and faster – improvement in response rates for patients with major depressive disorder. It represents a significant step forward in improving outcomes, enabling rapid discharge from hospitals for individuals with treatment-resistant depression, and we are hopeful it will lead to new possibilities in mental health care.”
Dr Hailun Cui from Fudan University, a PhD student in Professor Voon’s lab at the time of the study, added: “The management of treatment-resistant depression remains one of the most challenging areas in mental health care. These patients often fail to respond to standard treatments, including medication and psychotherapy, leaving them in a prolonged state of severe distress, functional impairment, and increased risk of suicide.
“This new TMS approach offers a beacon of hope in this difficult landscape. Patients frequently reported experiencing ‘lighter and brighter’ feelings as early as the second day of treatment. The rapid improvements, coupled with a higher response rate that could benefit a broader depressed population, mark a significant breakthrough in the field.”
Just under a half (48%) of participants in the dual treatment group reported local pain where the dual treatment was applied, compared to just under one in 10 (9%) of participants in the single treatment group. However, despite this, there were no dropouts.
For some individuals, this treatment may be sufficient, but for others ‘maintenance therapy’ may be necessary, with an additional day session if their symptoms appear to be worsening over time. It may also be possible to re-administer standard therapy as patients can then become more able to engage in psychotherapy. Other options include using transcranial direct current stimulation, a non-invasive form of stimulation using weak electrical impulses that can be delivered at home.
The researchers are now exploring exactly which part of the orbitofrontal cortex is most effective to target and for which types of depression.
The research was supported by in the UK by the Medical Research Council and by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.*
