(updated 12/2014)
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Summary
It’s an antidepresssant intervention at this point, not a mood stabilizer. It works, better than a placebo, but at least right now there’s no way most folks can pay for it. That’s about it: unfortunately, I didn’t change much between 2008, when this was written, and my 2014 update.
History
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation is not new. Use in mood disorders is called rTMS: “r” for repetitive — designed to distinguish this approach from the way it is used in research settings for other purposes, where the exposure is more brief). rTMS has been under research as a treatment for depression for at least a decade. The “new news” here is that it just received an FDA indication. It has been in use in Canada for years.
Indeed, about 2001 I requested and received a letter from the FDA confirming my impression that it could be used “off label” for the treatment of depression even back then. At that time, it had just been shown to be equivalent to ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) without the risks and side effects. That was very exciting. I was actually gearing up to buy a machine, for around $25,000, and add that to our services at the hospital where I was working at the time.
Problem one: causing hypomania?
However, I am glad that I did not. I continued to watch the literature on this technique. First problem: it has now been associated in case reports with the potential for inducing hypomania/mania. Nedjat But not very often: in 2014 I looked again and there were no more case reports. This issue was reviewed by Xia and colleagues (who noted that in the aggregate, those who received TMS, versus those who received sham treatment, showed no statistically greater likelihood of switching into hypomania.Xia
Problem two: how to pay for it?
The second problem is actually a much larger issue: how much is this going to cost? Until insurance companies decide to pay for it, the cost will come out of people’s pockets. At first it doesn’t look so bad: a 30 minute treatment. But in most research studies it was done every day or every other day, generally for at least many days if not several weeks. So the cost of this is going to be extremely high, certainly in the ballpark of ECT. That is pretty much out of reach for most working people, I think.
Therefore, one of the very unfortunate effects of this hoopla about the FDA indication is that it will raise hopes of a new treatment” before people discover that it is completely unavailable to them because of cost. As you know, insurance companies will wait for years labeling a new treatment experimental” so as not to have to pay for it. This is still the case with light boxes for light therapy, despite years of research and a virtually unequivocal acceptance of the method as a treatment for seasonally associated mood change. So we can expect that insurance companies will try to avoid paying for this as well, probably for years. Note that they are still not paying for VNS (vagus nerve stimulation), a very similar circumstance with a new technique that costs a lot of money.
You can imagine how this is going to work. A psychiatrist who is tired of the hard work of treating mood disorders with medication and psychotherapy is going to buy this new machine for $30,000 (or whatever it is going to cause now; probably more, with this new indication), and then restrict his or her practice to patients who can afford to pay $5,000 -$10,000 or more for a course of treatment with rTMS. It may well work.
Maintenance TMS?
What then? more money? So far no one has shown that this treatment will lead to a lasting change. And most people with highly recurrent or severe depression antidepressants are generally continued for six months to one year at minimum, and in patients with highly recurrent depression, antidepressant treatment is ongoing. When ECT in such people is effective, it often must be continued on a “maintenance” basis, one session of ECT every month or so to prevent recurrence. At this point it appears likely that rTMS will require similar ongoing treatmentLi, and thus additional expense.
Can we afford it?
What if insurance companies were forced somehow to pay for this? Can our medical care system afford that? rTMS sounds great: almost no risk (the seizure issue is a very minor concern at this point, it appears); almost no side effects (the headache problem is really minor); and good results (no better than existing treatments, mind you, such as ECT, but at least better than a placebo; in some of the more recent studies, it did not perform as well as ECT). But already we cannot afford our health care system. Already our patients cannot get some of the most expensive treatments because attempts by payers to limit access. The advent of rTMS will not help that circumstance, and in my view could make it worse, by raising alarm about how much treatment for depression could cost.
I do think this technique actually works, mind you. The research studies over the years do seem compelling. It’s the practicalities that are the problem. At this point, I don’t think the technique is so clearly better than what we already have as to warrant me or any of my colleagues going out to buy the device and start offering it to patients. Now, if it was free, that would be a different story . . .