Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in Pharmaco-naïve Patients With Major Depression

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.