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. 2023 Nov 16;13:347. doi: 10.1038/s41398-023-02631-y

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — This describes important details of both treatment types, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and magnetic seizure therapy (MST). Both treatments are typically only used on patients with treatment-resistant depression and involve inducing a seizure, either with an electrical current or a magnetic field. The main difference is that ECT has a more global spread to subcortical structures and hippocampus, whereas MST affects more local cortical structures. However, both treatment types significantly reduce depression ratings, with MST having a comparable but more modest therapeutic effect than ECT. We can see this clinical improvement in the datasets analyzed here, as measured by the HAMD-17 for ECT (pre median(IQR) = 23.0 (22, 24.5), post median(IQR) = 10 (8.5, 19), W(18) = 6, δ_Cliff = 0.89, p = 5.3 ×10⁻⁵) and the HAMD-24 for MST (pre-MST = 26.5 (24, 29), post-MST = 20 (19, 26), W(13) = 7, δ_Cliff = 0.55, p = 2.3 × 10⁻³).