Clinical results

At The TMS Center, 60% of our patients with treatment resistant depression show greater than 50% improvement in their depression scores – two thirds of this group has gone into remission. 

TMS to treat depression is a very well researched topic – the results from over a thousand clinical studies are published in the medical journals.   Many of these studies described trials with small numbers of patients, trials conducted using different forms of treatment and in different circumstances. Dr. Dennis Schutter of the University of Utrecht combined these trials’ results to try to gain a robust sense of the effectiveness of TMS for the treatment of depression.

His research findings were published in June 2008 and highlight the value of TMS. Dr. Schutter concludes: "...there is little doubt that magnetically induced electrical currents in the brain improve depression. The effect size is robust and comparable to at least a subset of commercially available anti-depressant drug agents".

Over the last five years, Professor Paul Fitzgerald and his colleagues at Monash University in Australia have done a series of clinical trials designed to explore how best to improve the efficacy of TMS.  Notable has been his advocacy for treating the right side of the brain as well as the left:  the right side is substantially involved in anxiety disorders {for many patients with depression, anxiety is a substantial component of their illness}. At The TMS Center, for many patients, we have adopted Prof Fitzgerald’s bilateral approach to stimulation and find, as his group does, that the positive response rate is very high.