Earlier in the week a Wall Street Journal article reported “Patients Seek Off-Label Depression Therapy: Magnetic Stimulation Shows Promise in Intractable Cases; Heading to Canada for Help.”
Although the treatment is not approved in the US for depression, US residents are heading to Canada to pay around US$7000 for 3-4 weeks of treatment. The treatment is a device-based therapy and works by delivering electromagnetic pulses to the brain. You can find more information on device-based depression therapy in a past article from NakedMedicine.com.
Off-label uses of psychiatric medication is actually very common practice, even though the article reported that doctors caution patients to wait until FDA approves the device for depresison treatment. Ironically, Canadian health insurance plans wouldn’t cover this procedure because the plans did not believe there to be enough evidence to show its effectiveness.
Current clinical trials are underway for gaining approval of this device in depression treatment. Anytime when there is off-label use, that means clinics are using it without following regulatory authority and may not be using the same approaches that have been tested in clinical trials. Patients also are paying out of their own pockets. This procedure may take 15-25 sessions depending on the patient. In clinical trials, the procedure was observed to be helpful for some patients, but certainly not all patients.
For now, only electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) are 2 nonmedical treatments approved for treating depression. VNS is only approved as an add-on therapy.
