ProLivᵀᴹ Rx in the News!

Podcasts and TV! What a week for at-home difficult-to-treat depression media coverage

It is my pleasure to report that difficult-to-treat depression is having a watershed moment…

Dr. Linda Carpenter

First, the Carlat Psychiatry Podcast featured Dr. Linda Carpetner, the Principal Investigator on the MOOD study.

Today, Chris Aiken follow up with an story about the interaction between Afferent Sensory stimulation in depression, such as ProLivᵀᴹ Rx.

As someone who works as CMO at Neurolief, the study sponsor of the MOOD study, I’m excited for a world where more thinkers, reporters, and investigators to continue to dig in to the mechanisms by which brain stimulation work.

As if this wasn’t enough coverage, she was featured on the news (WJAR 10) just last night! Watch it here.

Over at Radial, we have this quick explainer about the full range of neuromodulation treatments.

Dr. Owen Muir wearing ProLivᵀᴹ Rx on stage at RAMHT-AI.

Is it a big deal? Well, it’s a drug-free adjunctive treatment, with the following outcomes in an RCT, that can be administered at home:

Compared to sham treatment, participants receiving active treatment had significantly higher remission rates (21.3 % vs 6.0 %, p = 0.027) and achieved significantly more shifts to lower HDRS17 depression severity categories. Participants further improved during the subsequent eight weeks of open-label active stimulation with a mean reduction of almost 10 points from baseline and achieved a remission rate of 32 %.

Chris Aiken, on the Carlat Psychiatry podcast, adds some color to the dry data above in his recent podcast:

Before ProLivRx, the other recent approval was the Flow device. All of the devices we use in psychiatry were just cleared. TMS was cleared. ECT just cleared. We don't know how ProLivRx works, but we do know how it operates, by stimulating the sensory nerves, the occipital and trigeminal nerves. Think of it as an electrical massage of the face and head. The trigeminal nerve is the sensory nerve for the face, and the occipital nerve runs down the neck, encoding sensation for the back of the head, the top of the head, and around the ears. Our best guess of how ProLivRx works is that stimulating these sensory nerves has downstream effects in the brain, enhancing blood flow and reorganizing neurotransmitters and synaptic connections in parts of the brain that keep us alert and awake, the reticular activating system, and that regulate actions and emotions, like the locus coeruleus, the cingulate cortex, and that deep well of serotonin in the brain, the raphe nuclei.

Thanks for reading. It’s really getting fun to write about Brain Medicine!