A UNM professor is conducting research on the potential of a new kind of treatment for depression.
Dr. Christopher Abbott, associate professor of psychiatry at UNM, has studied the possibility of curing severe depression using electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and his research has begun to show promising results among its participants.
“It’s usually a last-resort treatment,” said Dr. Vince Calhoun, a distinguished professor of psychiatry and neurosciences at UNM, and head of the Medical Image Analysis lab at the Mind Research Network. “But it clearly works, and has an impact on a lot of these individuals.”
Calhoun said that patients are usually eager to help the research team better understand what depression means. Calhoun hopes that the knowledge they gain will help the project reach clinical trials.
“(Abbott) has been pretty successful,” Calhoun said. “At this point, close to 30 individuals have participated in the pre- and post-imaging process. It’s a lot of commitment from these people.”
While Abbott’s research shows potential as an effective treatment for depression, he has encountered some roadblocks — most notably, a lack of patients willing to participate in the program due to its stigma.
However, he said that medical technology has improved since the early days of ECT. Treatments are much safer, and there many factors in the potential success of modern ECT.
“It’s not only the short time frame, but the dramatic nature of the response: from very severe to complete remission in such a short period of time,” Abbott said. “What we’re trying to do is understand how the brain changes in that context.”
From 2005 to 2008, 10 percent of Americans older than 12 were taking antidepressants, according to the CDC, and in 2013 the National Institute for Mental Health estimated that 15 million American adults 18 and over suffered at least one major depressive episode in the preceding year.
Abbott said that ECT has always been the treatment of choice for his research due to its short time frame — six to eight weeks — and dramatic response rate, as opposed to pharmacological treatments, which Abbott said take longer and lack the efficacy rate that ECT has.
“One could argue that the pattern of response from an imaging perspective might be similar,” Abbott said. “We have no reason to doubt otherwise, but (efficacy) would probably be harder to detect.”
Fin Martinez is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo, he can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @FinMartinez
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