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This week on Healthwatch, we've been talking about mental wellness issues. Depression affects more than 18 million adult Americans, and while there are effective treatments for depression, many sufferers have a difficult time finding relief. Now doctors at UT Southwestern Medical Center are among those testing a new treatment that may offer hope.
The new treatment is called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. In this treatment, magnetic pulses stimulate an area of the brain associated with depression.
Dr. Mustafa Husain, the UT Southwestern psychiatrist leading the study, says that while general neural stimulation has been effective for treating depression, it can also cause side effects. This treatment targets only a specific part of the brain with the same amount of magnetic energy used in an MRI scan. Patients treated with TMS experience few to no side effects.
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June 2005
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