What is Referenced-EEG® (rEEG®)

A new prescription for personalized medicine for psychiatry

One in four Americans will suffer a diagnosable mental illness in any given year. And when that happens, their physicians will have over 130 psychotropic drugs from which to choose, but only subjective, patient-reported symptoms on which to base their treatment. Unfortunately, the dominant approach to prescribing in psychiatry is “trial and error” medicine, so it’s no surprise that treatment failures in disorders like depression range from 40 to 60 percent.

Physicians have long sought some sort of objective, patient-based physiology data -- like the x-rays, EKG or blood tests used in general medicine -- to assist them in prescribing psychotropic medications. Founded by psychiatrists, CNS Response has developed biomarkers which describe the probable effectiveness of specific drugs based on the unique electrical signature of a patient’s brain. These markers aren’t used to diagnose, but to provide informative, patient-specific information to physicians treating mental illnesses.

Some call it personalized medicine. We call it Referenced-EEG®, a patented process which has helped thousands of patients. In a series of clinical trials on patients who suffered for years without responding to treatment, physicians guided over 75 percent of them to medications that worked. Often the right medication was a combination of two medications. And sometimes, the right answer was no medication at all. rEEG® provides physicians with objective clinical data to support treatment based on patient physiology. Physicians using rEEG frequently achieve superior efficacy, often in less time and with fewer medications.

 

CNS Response Presentation at OneMedPlace ConferenceLightbox Video by VideoLightBox.com v1.6m

CEO, George Carpenter's presentation at OneMedPlace Finance Forum

January 12, 2010 | San Francisco, California

The Benefits of rEEG®

Patient Benefit

rEEG® has been used frequently for treatment-resistant mental disorders, in which patients have failed to respond to previous medications. With rEEG®, treatment is informed by physiological measures of the brain, not just patient symptoms. This often leads physicians to more effective treatments, with fewer treatment failures.

Physician Benefit

Today, physicians treat complex mental disorders, originating in the brain, with powerful medications based only on their patient’s retrospective recall and limited patient observation. Few other medical specialties are forced to base treatment on self reported symptoms and observation alone.

While some patients achieve remission under “trial and error”, many do not. Increasingly, psychiatric practices see complex patients who have failed multiple medication trials. These patients sometimes need special, unscheduled attention which can put clinicians on call 24/7. Most providers would like to be more successful in identifying the correct treatments for their patients. Physicians have reported that the rEEG® report provides useful information in approximately 75 percent of their most challenging cases.

Payer Benefit

Failed treatment efforts are not only disappointing to patients, families and clinicians, but are also very costly. Inefficient treatment is costly. Ineffective treatment is costly. In fact, it is estimated by some that 10 percent of the behavioral disorder patients account for 40 percent of the total costs of behavioral care. rEEG® changes this equation dramatically.

Pharmaceutical Developers Benefit

Determining who will benefit from a new medication is costly, usually inefficient, and often not completely understood. rEEG® benefits developers of new therapies in many ways, including:

  • Identifying patient populations that will respond well to their medication when previous clinical trial efforts have failed to show success
  • Identifying new uses of medications previously approved Identifying synergistic relationships between combinations of medications
  • Designing clinical trials
  • Understanding dose-response of new medications

 

What does a report look like?

rEEG® findings are presented in a brief, 2-page report which characterizes any underlying abnormality in the brain, identifies resistance or sensitivity to major drug classes and individual medications.

 
 
Copyright 2010 CNS Response