lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) tagged posts

Effective New Target for Mood-Boosting Brain Stimulation found

This is a composite view of recording sites used for identifying neural correlates of mood state in the epilepsy monitoring unit patients; a subset of these were also used in the stimulation studies.
Credit: Ben Speidel, Chang Lab, UCSF

Researchers have found an effective target in the brain for electrical stimulation to improve mood in people suffering from depression. As reported in the journal Current Biology on November 29, stimulation of a brain region called the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) reliably produced acute improvement in mood in patients who suffered from depression at the start of the study.

Those effects were not seen in patients without mood symptoms, suggesting that the brain stimulation works to normalize activity in mood-related neural circuitry, the researchers sa...

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