NeuroQore wants to shoot magnetic pulses into your brain to try to treat mental disorders such as anxiety and depression. Most doctors will give patients a number of drugs to treat these disorders, and up to two-thirds of patients won’t respond to their first drug.
Another 10 to 30 percent of these same patients will never respond to drugs as treatment. But NeuroQore (not to be confused with Neurocore, the “brain performance” centers bankrolled by Betsy DeVos) hopes to replace drugs with these pulses and thinks it may be onto something with initial tests.
“We have an 87.5 percent remission success rate over drug-resistant depression,” co-founder Mehran Talebinjad tells TechCrunch.
It’s quite the claim, and the startup is in the very early stages with a very small amount of subjects at the moment, but similar brain wave technology has been around to treat mental diseases since the mid-1990s.
Neurofeedback sprang up a couple of decades ago to help with depression, anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, impulse control and a number of different types of addiction. It’s mostly used in social work professions or clinics where drugs are not the primary method of treatment, and works by stimulating parts of the brain to send a positive signal whenever a desired mood is achieved.
When a desirable brainwave pattern appears, the neurofeedback machine sends a pleasant tone (positive feedback) into the patient’s ears, which hopefully causes the brain to prolong that desirable brainwave pattern. Over time, the brain is trained to prolong a healthy brainwave pattern permanently.