There is something in the Netherlands called The Precision Electroconvulsive Therapy Consortium. The consortium consists of three women and six men, although electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in Western countries is generally given to more women than men. They have recently been given a grant of 600,000 euros to “analyze (cost-) effectiveness and side-effects of ECT and compare it to treatment with antidepressants in merged clinical and research cohorts” and also set up a website about ECT.
But what, I wonder, is “precision ECT”? What makes it different to the ordinary sort? ECT consists of putting electrodes on someone’s head and giving them an electric shock so they have a seizure. Even if you use “dose titration” to try and establish someone’s seizure threshold it is a fairly rough and ready method and then the optimal strength of the electric shock is considered to be a rather vague one and a half to twice seizure threshold, so we are not talking about getting exactly the right number of millicoulombs. And you put the electrodes on either side of the head, or, less commonly, on one side of the head. Again, nothing too precise about it.
A quick search reveals that I have misunderstood. Precision ECT is to do not with its administration but rather with how it is prescribed, the idea being that you give it to those people who are likely to benefit and not be harmed by it. But hasn’t that always been the idea? The term is borrowed from medicine and I could only find a couple of articles mentioning “precision ECT”. In medicine the term is explained here. (“According to the Precision Medicine Initiative, precision medicine is ‘an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.’)
ECT statistics 