#CiudadReal: Mancha Centro expands its services for the treatment of depression and anxiety
Mancha Centro University Hospital has added transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to its mental health portfolio, a new therapy for the treatment of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and addictions.
TMS is a non-invasive therapy that involves applying a magnetic stimulus to a specific area of the cerebral cortex using a coil that generates a low-intensity electrical current. Each pathology has a specific target, and repeated stimulation over time and over several days will cause this improvement on a psychopathological level.
As explained by Dr. Luis Leon, head of the psychiatric service at the Alcazareno Hospital, transcranial magnetic stimulation is a complement to conventional pharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments.
Mancha Centro Expands Depression Treatment Services
Moreover, the specialist explains, “it is applied to patients undergoing treatment and observation who have a specific psychiatric diagnosis, and it is individually assessed whether their condition will improve after this treatment.”
In this sense, Leon reminds us that “we talk about personalized planning therapy because, despite what protocols and clinical guidelines define, each person has an individual treatment, both in dosage and duration.”
The first session helps determine which area of the skull the stimulation is applied to (for example, in the case of treating depression, the area to be stimulated would be the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)), as well as the motor threshold of the stimulus. intensity, which is different for each person and will vary depending on the progress of treatment.
The duration ranges from twenty-five to thirty sessions, about ten minutes for depression and twenty for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Although accelerated protocols have recently been developed to concentrate the greatest number of sessions into a few days, it is very difficult to see improvement in such a short time.
In its most severe forms, obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder that can seriously interfere with the sufferer’s daily activities.
Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) or treatment-resistant depression is a term used in clinical psychiatry to describe cases of major depressive disorder (MDD) that have not responded adequately to two antidepressants given at appropriate doses and durations.
The new service was launched on November 6, together with the initial training of the Psychiatry and Mental Health Service of the Mancha Center by the head of the Neurophysiology Service of the Gregorio Marañón University Hospital, Julio Ignacio Prieto Montalvo, which consisted of a theoretical and practical session on the launch of the new equipment for transcranial magnetic stimulation.
This is another step in the treatment of treatment-resistant depression, a problem that can affect 30 percent of patients with major depressive disorder, with an annual incidence of 0.93/1000 people, meaning it will be present in almost one in a thousand people. . Treatment-resistant depression is associated with poorer quality of life, greater comorbidity, social and occupational disability, and poorer therapeutic outcomes.
For his part, the Managing Director of the Authority, Dr. Lucas Salcedo, said that the Authority’s goal in the short and medium term is to continue to expand therapeutic tools for the treatment of serious mental disorders through new psychotropic drugs and other physical therapies. , on a path of continuous innovation to improve and improve the quality of care processes. In addition, this expansion of the service portfolio will also be useful in the research area.