I've been interested in artificial brain stimulation for a while: the developments being made in using various stimuli to treat neural conditions is moving at pace.
Guardian science reporter Alok Jha has written about deep brain stimulation and last year on a trip to MIT last year I met Professor John Guttag and found out more about his work on brainwave analysis and epilepsy
It turns out that the same technique used by Guttag, Vagal Nerve Stimulation (essentially a pacemaker attached to one of the major nerves going into the brain) could be useful for dealing with depression.
VNS has been used for 10 years to treat epilepsy, where it can cut the number of seizures for some patients by about 40 percent. Doctors began to suspect it held potential for treating severe depression when patients clung to the device, even when it wasn't helping their epilepsy.
"We asked (epilepsy) patients who weren't being helped if we could remove the device and by and large, the patients said, 'No, no, don't take this away,'" says Dr. Mitchel Kling of the National Institutes for Health. "In some cases where there wasn't good seizure control, patients' mood problems stabilized."
The researchers also admit they don't really know why VNS helps with depression, which just goes to show that however much we think we know about the body and its functions, we're still a world away from understanding what goes on inside the brain.
