Theme: Technology

Project Description

Depression is a gendered illness. For every four men with a diagnosis of major depression there are five women. Concurrently, research into women’s mental health is systemically underfunded. To redress this critical imbalance we need to research and develop interventions that work for women, by taking into account dimensions of variability unique to women. In this project you will work on developing the evidence base for next-generation treatments for clinical depression in women.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a common treatment for depression where antidepressants have not worked. TMS involves repeated application of magnetic pulses to the brain to change the way it functions. It is an effective treatment, but there may be ways to make it more effective. For example, in menstruating women, brain activity has been shown to systematically vary with hormonal fluctuations across the menstrual cycle. This raises the exciting question; could we identify a point in the cycle where a TMS treatment has the greatest effect on the brain? This could boost treatment efficacy and eventually change lives.

In this project you will combine TMS with Optically Pumped Magnetometers (TMS/OPM) – a state-of-the-art neuroimaging technique developed in Birmingham and deployed here for the first time at our new Translational OPM Facility – while applying TMS to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the standard target for depression interventions. This will allow us to understand the effect of TMS on the brain with unprecedented accuracy.

You will recruit a cohort of menstruating women and measure their behaviour and brain activity with TMS and OPM across one menstrual cycle. You will analyse this data to develop a novel temporally-targeted TMS intervention, suitable for first-in-patients application. You will learn to plan and conduct neuroscience research studies and acquire and analyse neuroimaging data in a field of critical importance for women’s mental health.