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At some point in their lives, 4% of women face the problem of anorexia. For example, now this disease overcomes the 40-year-old actress Angelina Jolie, whose weight has reached a critical minimum – 35 kilograms. It is known that psychotherapy helps only one third of patients. Are there other ways to get rid of a deadly disease?
20% of patients with anorexia die prematurely from the disease, and this is the highest mortality rate among all patients with mental disorders. Since psychotherapy cures no more than 10-30% of patients, and drugs are most often ineffective at all, psychiatrists decided to try therapies that act directly on the neurobiological basis of the disorder.
One of the promising methods is the so-called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a non-invasive method based on external stimulation of certain areas of the brain with magnetic fields. TMS, in particular, is being used as an experimental treatment for depression.
Jessica McClelland from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London (UK) and her colleagues conducted a study in which they studied the effectiveness of one type of TMS. The experiment involved 49 patients divided into two groups, one of which underwent a real procedure, and the other – its imitation (placebo). The severity of anorexia symptoms was measured immediately before and after the procedure, as well as 20 minutes and 24 hours after its completion.
Before and after the TMS session, patients watched a two-minute video that was supposed to provoke anorexia symptoms. The heroes of this video ate chocolate and chips, and the same products lay next to the participants, who had to evaluate their taste, smell, appearance, and their desire to eat them. Patients also took self-control and decision-making tests, during which they were offered a choice: receive a small amount of money right now or wait a certain period of time (from two weeks to two years) and are guaranteed to receive a larger amount.
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As it turned out, patients who underwent a real TMS session made decisions less impulsively and more rationally, more often agreeing to wait for the greater benefit. They also had less obsessive desire to restrict their food intake and less false beliefs that they did not want to eat and were overweight. The positive effect persisted 24 hours after the procedure.
“The longer the disease lasts, the more changes take place at the level of the brain, making treatment more difficult. Finding more effective therapies for this disorder is critical, and our preliminary results show a strong potential for TMS in the treatment of anorexia. In the near future, we plan to test the long-term effectiveness of the method by conducting a study with not one, but with 20 TMS sessions and monitoring the condition of patients for longer,” says one of the authors of the study Ulrike Schmidt (Ulrike Schmidt).
Подробнее см. J. McClelland et al. «A Randomised Controlled Trial of Neuronavigated Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) in Anorexia Nervosa», PLOS One, March 2016.