What is rEEG®?
Referenced-EEG (rEEG®) is the first objective, physiology-based system consistently shown to guide psychiatrists to appropriate treatment in the most challenging patients. It is the culmination of a 20-year effort combining Quantitative Medicine, Psychiatry and Pathology that allows a physician for the first time to objectively determine which CNS (central nervous system) medications will be effective for a particular patient.
Psychiatrists and addictionologists are now using this system to guide treatment of patients previously defined as treatment-resistant. Approximately 75% of these patients have, in fact, been successfully treated with currently available medications when rEEG® was utilized to guide treatment.
The problem we solve
"There are over 100 medications available for treatment of behavioral disorders. The core problem is not that we need three more. The problem is we need to know how to use the 100 that we have."
– Stephen Suffin, M.D., Co-founder
Medical treatment of mental disorders differs fundamentally from the treatment of all other health disturbances in one important way – psychiatrists or addiction specialists have no objective physiologic measurements to guide treatment of mental or addictive illness. Twentieth Century technical advances provided x-rays to the orthopedist, EKGs to the cardiologist and CT scans to the neurologist, but did not lead to any analogous technology for psychiatrists. There is no physiologic brain measurement system available to assist the physician/psychiatrist. Treatment choice primarily has relied on a diagnostic system that considers behavioral observations by the physician/psychiatrist and descriptions of emotion and behavior by patient or family members as the basis for prescribing medications.
Without the benefit of any physiology-based measurement tools, physicians/psychiatrists simply are making an educated guess at what effective therapy might be. Clinical treatment is neither efficient nor completely effective in most cases. Approximately 70% of patients have either no, or an incomplete, response to medications.
Referenced-EEG® (rEEG®) is a patented (issued 2003 and 2007) proprietary technology of CNS that utilizes commonly used digital electroencephalography (EEG) in conjunction with a normative database and a proprietary clinical (symptomatic) database to identify abnormal patient physiology. Appropriate medications are then statistically selected specifically to normalize discovered abnormalities. This process has been correlated to treatment outcome in a database of over 1,600 patients and 13,000 medication trials. The results of the analysis for each patient are produced in a two-page report provided to the physician from the CNS reference laboratory. Treatment directed by rEEG® has led to positive outcomes in over 75% of the 3000+ patients who have previously failed to respond to traditional treatment efforts as indicated in retrospective and prospective trials as well as in pilot clinical programs.
Application
CNS Response technologies are also being applied in drug research and development, a field that has been plagued by the same lack of physiologic markers as has clinical psychiatric care. rEEG® can be used to improve the success of FDA clinical trials, to provide insight on effective therapeutic dosing of investigational drugs, to identify additional indications for psychiatric medications, to provide insight into effective drug combinations, and to identify psychiatric indications for non-psychiatric medications, to manage adverse neuropsychiatric effects of other medications and for other benefits.