> “The less treatment-resistant participants are, the longer the treatment lasts,” said postdoctoral scholar Eleanor Cole, PhD, a lead author of the study.
Treatment resistance probably refers to prior treatments, which is a sort of indicator of severity or, well, resistance to treatment. So it makes sense to me that people who were less resistant to prior treatments would show more immediate longer-lasting effects.
But it's confusing.
This is impressive but it's not a randomized controlled trial at all, and it's a fairly select group of patients, so it's hard to know what to make of it. TMS treatment of depression has kind of been plagued with publication bias effects -- not to say there's no effect but more rigorous meta-analyses have suggested that publication bias is significant in the area.
Sometimes with very severe patients you see more regression to the mean, in that they have bigger apparent improvements in control conditions just because they can only stay the same or get better.
The results of this study are pretty exciting, but the idea of using various forms of TMS to treat depression has been kicking around for a while, and several groups have been trying to optimize the stimulation in different ways.
Here's a decent review of its effectiveness https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6582998/
and here's another group that's trying something similar: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5344760/
If the way they're doing this treatment involves hitting the subject with magnetic stimulation in "all possible parts of the search space" that might potentially solve the problem, then if you've already half-treated a subject (stimulated one entire side of their brain, say) and it didn't work, that means both that they're "treatment-resistant" and that the second treatment should only focus on the other half of the brain.