Are there reliable studies that detected neuronal damage before?
Americanbobtail on
I noticed the study did not use a functional MRI for brain mapping/activity. Why is that?
ceciliabee on
My experience of ect certainly includes damage but i don’t know that I can say what kind as far as neuronal or not. There were definitely side effects that were so bad I stopped the treatment, and that never completely went away. Zap zap!
Miss_Behaves on
All I know is that my ECT treatments wiped out *huge* chunks of my memory. I wonder if that would be considered damage or not
Yuri909 on
Then why is my mother’s memory so shorted out? She claims it was the electrotherapy.
manofredearth on
Several people are asking “what about memory loss?” Memory loss doesn’t have to be caused by physical damage to neurons, this may be more similar to a magnet erasing data on a hard drive.
neomateo on
What an utter load of garbage, every person Ive ever known that has received ECT is either on permanent disability as a result of it or they are dead.
dargonmike1 on
Connect a stim machine to your temples and crank the power you got yourself a homemade ETC therapy
Wren_Clarke on
My mother has Drug Resistant Major Depressive Disorder as well as Bipolar type 2 and OCPD and last year went through ECT.
She had serious memory loss issues immediately afterwards, forgetting common words, not being able to recall where she was coming from or going to. It was and continues to be extremely difficult for her to function and it had little to no impact on her depression. I have watched my mother struggle my entire life and ECT has been by far the worse. I know how well ETC can work for some, but for my mother, all it did was hurt her. To this day she will still have no recollection of conversations had the day prior. What is most frustrating is she knows that she is forgetting something and she knows why she is forgetting something. I wish I could take anyway this struggle for her, she was already dealing with a lot and then this was just the icing on the mental health cake of hers.
She sees her therapist 3 times a week and has started horse therapy as well, which has had the best results of all of her treatments but is obviously not a fix-all. I am going to continue encouraging her to try ketamine therapy as it is one of the last remaining things for her to try.
omg_drd4_bbq on
All this tells me is the models of “neuronal damage” and the models of how memory is stored in the brain are orthogonal. Memory loss is a well established and often debilitating side effect of ECT which reserves the therapy for only the most severe cases. “Neurons that fire together, wire together” aka the Hebbian rule, is probably the current best model of memory formation. You can “unwire” neurons by pruning the branches without damaging the cells in a neurotoxic sense.
Also, the reddit headline is junk, the actual title is **Blood biomarkers of neuronal injury and astrocytic reactivity in electroconvulsive therapy**
But actually,
> Baseline analysis revealed that serum levels of NfL (p < 0.001) and tau (p = 0.036) were significantly elevated in ECT recipients compared with controls, whereas GFAP levels showed no significant difference. Relative to T0, serum NfL concentration neither changed at T1 (mean change 3.1%, 95%CI −0.5% to 6.7%, p = 0.088) nor at T2 (mean change −3.2%, 95%CI −7.6% to 1.5%, p = 0.18). Similarly, no change in total tau was observed (mean change 3.7%, 95%CI −11.6% to 21.7%, p = 0.65). GFAP increased from T0 to T1 (mean change 20.3%, 95%CI 14.6 to 26.3%, p < 0.001), but not from T0 to T2 (mean change −0.7%, 95%CI −5.8% to 4.8%, p = 0.82). In conclusion, our findings suggest that ECT induces a temporary increase in serum GFAP, possibly reflecting transient astrocytic activation. Importantly, we observed no indicators of neuronal damage or long-term elevation in any assessed biomarker.
So they in fact did see (transient) metabolic marker changes. But they declare “we don’t see any indicators of neurotoxicity”. It just means they don’t know if their tests are sensitive enough. That’s a far, far cry from “Study shows no damage from ECT”.
astro-pi on
Yayyyyyyyy I’m so happy because it not only proves something we thought in biophysics, but it means that I have a safe alternative to medication if I need it
Chogo82 on
A study came out on long COVID showing that you need PET fMRI to see the damage to neuronal activity disproving that blood markers are enough. This study was dead at inception.
12 Comments
Are there reliable studies that detected neuronal damage before?
I noticed the study did not use a functional MRI for brain mapping/activity. Why is that?
My experience of ect certainly includes damage but i don’t know that I can say what kind as far as neuronal or not. There were definitely side effects that were so bad I stopped the treatment, and that never completely went away. Zap zap!
All I know is that my ECT treatments wiped out *huge* chunks of my memory. I wonder if that would be considered damage or not
Then why is my mother’s memory so shorted out? She claims it was the electrotherapy.
Several people are asking “what about memory loss?” Memory loss doesn’t have to be caused by physical damage to neurons, this may be more similar to a magnet erasing data on a hard drive.
What an utter load of garbage, every person Ive ever known that has received ECT is either on permanent disability as a result of it or they are dead.
Connect a stim machine to your temples and crank the power you got yourself a homemade ETC therapy
My mother has Drug Resistant Major Depressive Disorder as well as Bipolar type 2 and OCPD and last year went through ECT.
She had serious memory loss issues immediately afterwards, forgetting common words, not being able to recall where she was coming from or going to. It was and continues to be extremely difficult for her to function and it had little to no impact on her depression. I have watched my mother struggle my entire life and ECT has been by far the worse. I know how well ETC can work for some, but for my mother, all it did was hurt her. To this day she will still have no recollection of conversations had the day prior. What is most frustrating is she knows that she is forgetting something and she knows why she is forgetting something. I wish I could take anyway this struggle for her, she was already dealing with a lot and then this was just the icing on the mental health cake of hers.
She sees her therapist 3 times a week and has started horse therapy as well, which has had the best results of all of her treatments but is obviously not a fix-all. I am going to continue encouraging her to try ketamine therapy as it is one of the last remaining things for her to try.
All this tells me is the models of “neuronal damage” and the models of how memory is stored in the brain are orthogonal. Memory loss is a well established and often debilitating side effect of ECT which reserves the therapy for only the most severe cases. “Neurons that fire together, wire together” aka the Hebbian rule, is probably the current best model of memory formation. You can “unwire” neurons by pruning the branches without damaging the cells in a neurotoxic sense.
Also, the reddit headline is junk, the actual title is **Blood biomarkers of neuronal injury and astrocytic reactivity in electroconvulsive therapy**
But actually,
> Baseline analysis revealed that serum levels of NfL (p < 0.001) and tau (p = 0.036) were significantly elevated in ECT recipients compared with controls, whereas GFAP levels showed no significant difference. Relative to T0, serum NfL concentration neither changed at T1 (mean change 3.1%, 95%CI −0.5% to 6.7%, p = 0.088) nor at T2 (mean change −3.2%, 95%CI −7.6% to 1.5%, p = 0.18). Similarly, no change in total tau was observed (mean change 3.7%, 95%CI −11.6% to 21.7%, p = 0.65). GFAP increased from T0 to T1 (mean change 20.3%, 95%CI 14.6 to 26.3%, p < 0.001), but not from T0 to T2 (mean change −0.7%, 95%CI −5.8% to 4.8%, p = 0.82). In conclusion, our findings suggest that ECT induces a temporary increase in serum GFAP, possibly reflecting transient astrocytic activation. Importantly, we observed no indicators of neuronal damage or long-term elevation in any assessed biomarker.
So they in fact did see (transient) metabolic marker changes. But they declare “we don’t see any indicators of neurotoxicity”. It just means they don’t know if their tests are sensitive enough. That’s a far, far cry from “Study shows no damage from ECT”.
Yayyyyyyyy I’m so happy because it not only proves something we thought in biophysics, but it means that I have a safe alternative to medication if I need it
A study came out on long COVID showing that you need PET fMRI to see the damage to neuronal activity disproving that blood markers are enough. This study was dead at inception.