Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has become a safe and efficacious treatment for patients with treatment-resistant depression (Mutz et al., 2019). Consequently, several countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel and the United States have approved rTMS as second-line treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD), while others have included rTMS in their guidelines for good clinical practice (e.g. Finland, Germany and Serbia). Historically, rTMS was conceptualized as a soft alternative to electroconvulsive therapy. Therefore, most studies to date primarily recruited patients with relatively high degrees of treatment-resistance (> two failed treatment attempts) and there is a lack of trials investigating rTMS as a first or second line treatment. This finding is contrasted by the fact that on the most stable predictors of response to rTMS is low-treatment resistance.~Therefore, this trial aims to compare the antidepressant efficacy of 20 pharmaco-naïve patients with 20 treatment-resistant patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder. In this open label trial, patients will receive four weeks high-frequency left-sided theta burst TMS (lDLFPC). The target will be located by neuronavigation to the target ascertained by Fox et al.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has become a safe and efficacious treatment for patients with treatment-resistant depression. In several studies investigating the antidepressant efficacy of rTMS, it has been shown that in low treatment-resistant patients rTMS is more efficacious than in patients where several treatment attempts have failed. Albeit this finding, most studies to date primarily recruited patients with relatively high degrees of treatment-resistance and there is a lack of trials investigating rTMS as a first-line treatment. Therefore, this trials aims to compare the antidepressant efficacy of 4 weeks open-label theta-burst TMS in non-treatment-resistant patients with a comparable group of treatment-resistant MDD patients.