Decoding Heart Rate Signals To Refine Brain Stimulation Therapies for Depression

Study suggests heart rate may be a useful tool to determine where to stimulate the brains of individuals with depressive disorders when brain scans aren’t available.

New research suggests a common brain network exists between heart rate deceleration and depression. By evaluating data from 14 people with no depression symptoms, the team of researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, found stimulating some parts of the brain linked to depression with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), also affected heart rate, suggesting clinicians may be able to target those areas without the use of brain scans that aren’t widely available. The findings were published recently in the journal Nature Mental Health.

Heart-Brain Coupling and TMS
“Our goal was to figure out how to harness TMS treatment more effectively, get the dosing right, by selectively slowing down heart rate and identifying the individual best spot to stimulate on the brain,” said senior author Shan Siddiqi, MD, of the Brigham’s Department of Psychiatry and the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics. Siddiqi said the idea first developed during a conference in Croatia where researchers from the Netherlands were presenting heart-brain coupling data.