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Magnets for Troubled Minds?
Therapy Stills Voices in Schizophrenics, Study Finds
March 26, 2000 Adam Marcus
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.
What To Do
For more on schizophrenia, try the Doctor's Guide. You can also visit the
National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.
NOTE: Any links to external sites will open in a new browser window.
External sites are not part of drkoop.com, and drkoop.com has no control over
their content or availability.

SOURCES: Interviews with Ralph Hoffman, M.D., director, Yale Psychiatric
Institute, New Haven, Conn.; Martin Szuba, M.D., director, lab for
transcranial stimulation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; March 25,
2000 The LancetHealthSCOUT ©2000 Rx Remedy, Inc. All rights reserved

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