University of Iowa Health Care is among only three academic medical centers in the nation, and the first in the Midwest, to offer what promises to be groundbreaking treatment for people who are dealing with major depression.
Dr. Nick Trapp, a UI psychiatry professor, says they’re using a time-tested type of therapy along with several innovative new techniques.
“Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, is essentially a magnetic field that’s generated around the brain,” Trapp says, “completely non-invasively using what looks essentially like a waffle iron that sits up against the head and generates electric fields in the brain.”
SAINT Hardware (Photo courtesy Magnus Medical)
The device can help to stimulate the brain, he says, or potentially inhibit certain regions as they relate to depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. While TMS has been around for years, the so-called SAINT version of the technology now in use in Iowa City is brand new. Trapp says it can help to pinpoint the best location to target in each patient’s brain.
“It’s the first time in psychiatry that we’ve had an imaging-guided procedure,” Trapp says. “Patients will actually come in and get an MRI scan, which is looking at both the structure of the brain as well as the function of the brain — how your brain is using oxygen and glucose — and we can use that information to essentially find a personalized target for each patient to deliver treatment.”
SAINT stands for Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy, and Trapp trained under the researchers who developed it at Stanford University. Besides being guided by the precise imagery, he says SAINT has other remarkable, novel benefits for patients.
“It condenses what is usually a six-week course of treatment, where you’re coming in for six weeks every day for five days a week,” Trapp says. “SAINT condenses that down into a single week, and so we can administer and complete a treatment course in five days, and the benefits from that seem to be as good, if not better, than the six-week treatment course.”
SAINT has only been in use at the UI for a matter of months, and Trapp says it’s being used in a limited number of patients who have major depression and who haven’t responded to other therapies and medications. For many, he says, SAINT has been a complete game changer.
“Sometimes these patients have suicidal thoughts. They’re often not working or having work or family function significantly impaired,” Trapp says. “For people who’ve done well with this treatment, we can sometimes see those symptoms go completely into remission, so sometimes functioning better at work or returning to work, having depressive symptoms significantly improved or completely gone.”
He says the early data shows up to 80-percent of patients experience remission of their depression symptoms, with the effects often lasting months.