Why SWIFT Matters: The Cost of Time
An accelerated treatment option, called SWIFT™ Deep TMS, is also FDA-cleared, shortening the acute treatment phase from 4 weeks to 6 days and individual treatment sessions to 10 minutes. There are 5 treatments per day with 50-minute breaks in between.
Widespread adoption of the SWIFT approach, which reduces the number of clinic visits in the acute phase by ~70%, could alter how interventional psychiatry is delivered, improving patient retention and expanding clinical options at a time when demand for non-drug depression therapies is rising.
In a large, randomized, multisite non-inferiority trial, patients treated with BrainsWay’s accelerated protocol achieved:
- 87.8% response rate
- 78.0 % remission rates
- Median time to remission of 21 days, compared with 28 days under the standard daily protocol
“SWIFT demonstrates that we can substantially reduce treatment burden without compromising on outcomes, which fundamentally changes what access looks like for patients,” said Colleen A. Hanlon, Ph.D., Vice President of Medical Affairs at BrainsWay.
Try TMS – A Proven Alternative Treatment for Depression
The 9-question Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) is a diagnostic tool introduced in 2001 to screen adult patients in a primary care setting for the presence and severity of depression. It rates depression based on the self-administered Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ). The PHQ is part of Pfizer’s larger suite of trademarked products, called the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD). The PHQ-9 takes less than 3 minutes to complete and simply scores each of the 9 DSM-IV criteria for depression based on the mood module from the original PRIME-MD. Primary care providers frequently use the PHQ-9 to screen for depression in patients.
