How Successful is TMS for Treating Depression?

by Katie Leslove Blogger

Many patients with depression don’t see results with traditional treatments like medication and psychotherapy. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, also known as TMS therapy, is a great solution for many of these patients. But how exactly does TMS therapy work and how successful is it in treating depression?

How successful is TMS for treating depression?

The factors for a depression treatment working are usually a positive response or remission. A positive response refers to an improvement in depressive symptoms in this context, while remission refers to the complete or sustained absence of depression symptoms. While a clinician or doctor can usually see certain features of depression, patients themselves usually need to self-report the frequency and severity of their depression symptoms.

Clinicians and patients usually use diagnostic tools, like the Patient Health Questionnaire, module 9, also known as PHQ-9. The PHQ-0 asks users to identify the frequency of their depression with nine key metrics of depression, seen in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, also called DSM-5. Another excellent tool used to measure depression treatment is the 30-question Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology, also called IDS. This tool is typically used to test the severity of the patient’s depression.

The Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, also known as HDRS, is a 17-question assessment of the severity of depression symptoms experienced by a patient over the past week. The Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale, also called MADRS, is a 10-question diagnostic used by clinics designed to support the HDRS and assess the potential changes that antidepressants can have on patient responses to assessments.

Studies on efficacy of TMS therapy for depression

There have been a few prominent studies over the years on the efficacy of TMS therapy as a depression treatment. A 2012 study by Linda L. Carpenter, MD, a researcher at Brown University, assessed the TMS therapy success rate among 307 patients with depression across 42 different TMS clinical practice sites in the United States. The study found that TMS therapy had a success rate of 58 percent in reducing depressive symptoms and 37.1 percent in causing patients with depression to go into remission, showing that TMS therapy is an effective treatment for patients who did not see adequate results from antidepressants.

A 2014 study by Dunner et al published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry assessed the durability of benefit or how sustainable TMS therapy success was after the end of active treatment, studying 257 adults with depression and resistance to traditional treatments. The study found that TMS therapy had a success rate of 62.5 percent, with 120 patients meeting IDS-SR criteria for either depression remission or a response to depression treatment by the end of the initial treatment and 75 patients continuing to meet criteria for response 12 months after the end of the initial treatment.