Nolan Williams and colleagues at Stanford compressed that schedule into five days, delivering ten sessions daily, and used each patient's own brain scan to aim the stimulation at a more precise target than earlier protocols used.
In a randomized, sham-controlled trial of 29 adults with treatment-resistant depression, 79 percent of those who received the real five-day protocol no longer met criteria for depression afterward, compared with 13 percent of those who received a sham version of the same schedule.
The approach, called SAINT and later renamed Stanford Neuromodulation Therapy, received FDA clearance in 2022 based on this small trial. It has not yet been tested head to head against standard six-week stimulation in a large trial, and whether the fast results last as long is still being studied in follow-up patients.
Read the original study
Cole et al., American Journal of Psychiatry, 2022 · doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2021.20101429
A month of treatment compressed into a week.
Source
- Cole, E. J., Phillips, A. L., Bentzley, B. S., Stimpson, K. H., Nejad, R., Barmak, F., Veerapal, C., Khan, N., Cherian, K., Felber, E., Brown, R., Choi, E., King, S., Pankow, H., Bishop, J. H., Azeez, A., Coetzee, J., Rapier, R., Odenwald, N., . . . Williams, N. R. (2022). Stanford Neuromodulation Therapy (SNT): A Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 179(2), 132–141. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2021.20101429