- With Mayo Clinic psychiatrist
David Mrazek, M.D.
read biographyclose windowBiography of
David Mrazek, M.D.
David Mrazek, M.D.
Dr. David A. Mrazek is chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., and a professor of psychiatry at College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic. Dr. Mrazek has developed a federally funded psychiatric pharmacogenomics research program and implemented clinical psychiatric pharmacogenomics services at Mayo Clinic.
He has received numerous awards including the Award for Creativity in Psychiatric Education from the American College of Psychiatrists and the Agnes Purcell McGavin Award for Distinguished Career Achievement in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association. He currently serves as chairman of the board of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.
Dr. Mrazek has focused his current efforts on using pharmacogenomics testing to improve clinical care. One of his specific goals is to decrease the risks of taking psychiatric medications.
Latest entries
- Complexity of depression diagnosis makes treatment difficult
March 8, 2012
- Depression sometimes shifts to bipolar disorder
Jan. 21, 2012
- Antidepressant use soaring among Americans 12 and over
Dec. 7, 2011
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation offers hope treating depression
Oct. 19, 2011
- New antidepressant offers hope
Sept. 3, 2011
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Depression blog
-
Oct. 19, 2011
Transcranial magnetic stimulation offers hope treating depression
By David Mrazek, M.D.
At the Mayo Clinic, we continue to pursue research projects designed to improve the treatment of depression. When I read some of your stories, it's a strong incentive for us to keep working.
| Need more help? |
|
Much of our research has focused on how to more effectively select the right antidepressant for individuals. We've made some progress, but there's still too much uncertainty.
Perhaps the most frustrating problem is the reality that for a few of you, there's currently no antidepressant medication that will help. Clearly, it would be important to be able to identify who won't respond in order to save them from having to go through a discouraging series of medications that won't help.
Another big question: What alternative treatments might be effective for those who don't respond to medication? For more than 50 years, electroconvulsant therapy (ECT) has been an option. ECT works well for some, but it's expensive and often results in some memory loss. A newer option we've been studying is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). One of the advantages of TMS therapy over ECT treatment is that there's no need to administer an anesthetic and there's no memory loss associated with the treatment.
The main problems with TMS have been that it may take up to six weeks for people to feel better and it's expensive. At the Mayo Clinic, we've been able to treat some people with TMS therapy who haven't responded to antidepressants. Our initial results are somewhat encouraging. Recently, I evaluated a research participant who had almost lost hope. Fortunately, he was willing to try TMS as part of our research protocol. While I tried to be optimistic, I was worried that since all of his other treatments had failed, the probability that TMS would help him was pretty low.
Fortunately, I was surprised and pleased to follow his progress. He had steady but slow improvement in his symptoms on a week to week basis. After 6 weeks and 30 treatments, he had officially achieved a therapeutic response in his symptoms based on the criteria of the study. Of course, about half of our participants achieve a complete remission of their symptoms in eight weeks with a simple antidepressant. The difference between those who have a rapid recovery and those who struggle with depression for years is dramatic.
In the years ahead, we hope to be able to be able to examine the genomic profiles of our patients to be able to predict with a much higher degree of probability whether they'll respond to either treatment with an SSRI or TMS. I feel certain that eventually we'll achieve this goal, but we haven't yet.
28 comments posted
Share on:
28 comments posted