Dr. Nolan Williams

Depression is the most disabling condition worldwide.

What's interesting about depression is it's both a risk factor for other illnesses and it makes other medical and psychiatric illnesses worse, right?

So recently, the American Heart Association added depression as the fourth major risk factor for coronary artery disease, right?

So alongside depression,

The risk factors that we know, hypertension, high blood pressure, hyperlipidemia, high cholesterol and diabetes, high blood sugar, those three have been on the list for a long time and depression end up being added to the list as the fourth one.

A lot of what we're doing in the lab actually is measuring kind of brain heart connections and we can actually with

transcranial magnetic stimulation, a form of brain stimulation, we can actually decelerate the heart rate.

We can capture that heart rate deceleration over the mood regulatory regions.

And so actually a direct probe of that connection.

We've been very interested in a very particular clinical set of problems around the most severe and the most high acuity settings that folks with depression end up being in.

And that's in emergency situations.

settings where they go into inpatient units.

The field really hasn't developed a way of, you know, consistently being able to treat that problem.

And folks end up getting the same standard oral antidepressants that they've been getting outpatient.

And I came to this because, you know, dual trained as a neurologist and psychiatrist went back and forth between neurology and psychiatry, saw that in neurology, we have all of these ways of treating acute

brain-based problems and really wanted to emulate that in psychiatry and find ways to develop and engineer new brain-based solutions.

The first place where the stimulation goes is called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

It's kind of the

sense of control, kind of governor of the brain.

And then what we know is that when you use a magnet, kind of what we call Faraday's Law, this idea of using a magnetic pulse to induce an electrical current in electrically conducting substances, so in this case, brain tissue, but not skull or scalp or any of that, or hair, you avoid all that, just the brain tissue, then you have a direct depolarization of cortical neurons