After a 4-hour long operation, the surgeon is done. He has just drilled two holes into his patient’s skull, snaked metal electrodes into a region of the brain called area 25, and flipped the switch on an external generator so that high frequency bursts begin to stimulate the tissue. This is all part of neurologist Helen Mayberg’s clinical trial of treating severe depression through deep-brain stimulation (DBS) surgery. Mayberg believes that precise stimulation of a tiny bundle of nerve fibers in area 25—tucked under the corpus callosum—can lift sufferers’ dark cloud of depression. Prior neuroimaging studies have pinpointed abnormal activity in this region. In healthy people, the region lights up when thinking of sad events like a death in the family. In people with depression, however, this area doesn’t change at all—almost as if it’s stuck. So far, about 70% of Mayberg’s DBS patients have noted some sort of improvement, varying from modest to extremely well.
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