With magnetic hat represent a future treatment which shall take a half hour a day and can be done in the comfort of home on the couch.
Risk of, chronic depression
"About 30% of patients suffering from severe depression are resistant to medical treatment. And it can actually give them a chronic depression," according to experts. The problem is that the brain's receptors become oversaturated of medicine. This means that one can not treat. But the problem solver magnetic hat with electromagnetism. When power is applied to the seven magnets occurs electromagnetic pulse, which was down to the cellular level affect brain receptors.
Patients with depression who were treated with the helmet, it got significantly better. Their depression fell 20 steps of the so-called Hamilton-scale. It is the scale that is used to specify a numerical value for how severe a patient's depression. For the control group, who received the helmet on, but was not aware that there was no power to the magnets, decreased the degree of depression five steps.
Inspired by electroshock
In the 1990s, experiments with electric shocks, patients with severe psychosis that way again became susceptible to their medication. The patient had general anesthesia during the electro-shock, and the positive effect only lasted for about two months.
"The patients were all a kind of dry helmet on his head. The helmet seven coils create an electromagnetic field of the skull when you put power to the helmet. The magnetic field will go in and affect the impulses in the brain's nerve center," explains Per Bech.
The new magnethats treatment called PEMF (pulsed electromagnetic fields) which in a sense is a further development of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). Unlike TMS, which can cause some side effects, such as headaches, have PEMF therapy in the first study not given them. And that's some of the things you in Hillingdon will test in some dose-response studies to begin in the autumn.
Back to life
Magnetic hat is developed in collaboration with Professor Steen Dissing from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Panum Institute, University of Copenhagen. He is working to make the hat more comfortable to wear, so patients in the future may have a helmet at home.
"If you get sick today, and ends with resistance to medication or therapy, it is an admission the next step. It's hard for yourself and your family, like a prolonged hospitalization also costly to society, for example if you lose your work in progress, " says experts.
In view of the good results, the researchers will now investigate whether magnetic hat can completely eliminate the need for medication. The next step is after the analysis of the trial, various approvals and additional testing, so some years before the expected magnetic hat to become widely available.
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