THURSDAY, March 23 (HealthSCOUT) -- Schizophrenics who hear voices
could get a measure of peace from a new technique that uses magnets to
reprogram the electric circuitry of distressed nerve cells.
Yale University scientists say a dozen people treated for auditory
hallucinations with magnet therapy showed significant, and even prolonged,
improvement. While the approach is experimental, experts say, it could be a
promising treatment option for patients whose illness does not respond to
anti-psychotic medication.
Schizophrenia strikes about 1 percent of people in the United States, and
roughly 50 percent to 70 percent of patients suffer auditory hallucinations,
usually internal voices. While anti-psychotic medication helps reduce the
frequency of these imaginings, the drugs fail in about one quarter of the
cases.
Studies suggest that the chief source of auditory hallucinations is the
temporoparietal cortex, an area linked to language processing. Brain images
show that schizophrenics who hear voices have abnormal electrical activity in
this region.
In a previous study, Dr. Ralph Hoffman, director of the Yale Psychiatric
Institute in New Haven, Conn., and his colleagues showed that exposing the
temporoparietal cortex to transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS)
substantially reduced the number of hallucinations in a small group of
schizophrenics.
The latest study, which appears in this week's issue of The Lancet, covers
12 patients who received increasing doses of either the magnet therapy or
sham treatment in a series of up to eight trials. All of the patients were right
handed, since nearly every righty's language center is located in his left
temporoparietal cortex. (Lefties, however, are less predictable). After each
round, the two groups switched treatments.
Subjects treated with magnets showed significant improvement in the
number and severity of their auditory hallucinations compared with the
placebo groups, Hoffman says.
"We were pleasantly surprised," says Hoffman. "There were some real,
enduring effects. For some cases it was relatively prolonged."
Although most patients who received the magnet treatment returned to their
usual rate of hallucinations within days or weeks, one continued to benefit
from the therapy for two months.
Interestingly, says Hoffman, the magnet treatment was far less effective in
five patients who also took anti-psychotic drugs during the trials. Although
the reason for this isn't certain, Hoffman thinks the magnets may work best
when the brain's electrical signals are most disturbed.
The dose of magnetic energy Hoffman's team used was large, 1 Hz, or about
what's generated by a magnetic resonance imaging machine. Yet aside from
a few mild headaches, none of the patients reported any significant side
effects. "There's no data to suggest there's a safety hazard" from the
therapy, he says.
Dr. Martin Szuba, who directs transcranial stimulation at the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, calls the latest finding "extremely promising."
Most exciting, he says, is the prospect that the magnetism could ease
symptoms that had been present for so long -- decades, in some subjects --
in a short amount of time. Drugs, by comparison, usually take at least two
weeks to start working.
Szuba studies magnet therapy for the treatment of depression, and says the
therapy has led to "profound improvement" in some patients, even those who
failed to respond to antidepressants.
Still, he adds, larger and more statistically rigorous studies are needed
before the approach can be considered effective for either condition.
***********
Marcelo Puhl
mark@plug-in.com.br
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