About half a million of the military personnel who were deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq experienced PTSD, which UT Health San Antonio neurologist Dr. Peter Fox says occurs when trauma causes changes in the circuitry of the brain. “Depression, schizophrenia, PTSD — many disorders are appropriately conceived as the aberrant firing of a circuit,” Fox said. “People get negative thoughts, and they just won’t go away. There’s some pathway that you wish would shut up, and it’s not.”
Fox is a professor in the Department of Radiology at UT San Antonio, the director of the Research Imaging Institute at UT Health San Antonio, and he recently studied a treatment for combat veterans with PTSD that uses his team’s patented, MRI-guided, robotic-controlled transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to target that aberrant brain circuitry with an electromagnetic field, called “navigated TMS.” The imaging guides the robot arm to a specific location on the scalp. It then pulses magnetic fields through the skull, aiming at a small, specific area of the brain. The electrical currents disrupt neural activity, improving the symptoms of mental health disorders.
In Fox’s study, TMS was paired with a particular type of psychotherapy called prolonged exposure therapy, which he said also works by disrupting maladaptive neural pathways.
“If you get therapy, you’re modifying a brain network. So that’s what we were doing,” Fox explained. “And with the TMS, what I expect is that we’re inducing plasticity.” Plasticity is a property that allows the human brain to change, reorganize, and rewire itself…