At this week’s conference on medical innovation at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, researchers presented an electrical patch that has been found to reduce depression. According to the scientists, if your mental wellness is affected by the syndrome, wearing the electrical patch on your forehead while sleeping that can help to treat the symptoms.
The device is similar to a sticking plaster connected to a small battery pack by wires, and works by stimulating the nerves beneath your skin to feed key areas of your brain that are associated with mood. So far, trials have shown that the device, which causes a mild tingling sensation, can lead to a 50% improvement in your mental wellbeing, if you suffer from depression. It also may reduce the occurrence of epileptic seizures in patients who do not respond to drug treatments.
Dr Christopher DeGiorgio, a professor of neurology at the University of California in Los Angeles who invented the device, known as an external trigeminal nerve stimulation patch, said, ‘The patch is placed on the skin above the eyebrows and stimulates the nerve under the skin. It generates pulses of very low current – it feels like a mild tingling. This particular nerve projects to key regions in the brain that modulate both epilepsy and mood. We have found that it increases blood flow in areas of the brain that have decreased blood flow in people with depression.’
You replace the patch after each use with a fresh adhesive patch, and small scale clinical trials have shown that wearing it for at least eight hours over night could bring improvements in mood for people suffering from depression. This could improve the wellness of the one in ten adults in the UK who have been diagnosed with the condition at some point in their life, according to official statistics. The stats also show that prescriptions for antidepressant drugs, which can cause a number of side effects, have risen fourfold in the past 20 years.
Dr DeGiorgio noted that the device ‘stabilises the activity in areas of the brain of people who suffer from epilepsy,’ and Dr Leon Ekchian, chief executive at NeuroSigma, the company responsible for marketing the device, added that they were also now developing an implant based on the same idea that could be worn around the clock by epilepsy sufferers. He said, ‘If patients stop using their device, they see increased seizure rate again after a few days, so we are developing an implantable system so they don’t have the inconvenience of having to put it on each night.’ The device has now been approved for use in the European Union and the team are hoping it will become available on the NHS later this year.
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Could an Electrical Patch Help to Reduce Your Depression?
