[skat20phys]

In the context of the press release it was a little confusing to me because the published paper doesn't really report on anything that would be considered long-term. I assume she meant something like "the less treatment resistant, the more pronounced the effect"?

Treatment resistance probably refers to prior treatments, which is a sort of indicator of severity or, well, resistance to treatment. So it makes sense to me that people who were less resistant to prior treatments would show more immediate longer-lasting effects.

But it's confusing.

This is impressive but it's not a randomized controlled trial at all, and it's a fairly select group of patients, so it's hard to know what to make of it. TMS treatment of depression has kind of been plagued with publication bias effects -- not to say there's no effect but more rigorous meta-analyses have suggested that publication bias is significant in the area.

Sometimes with very severe patients you see more regression to the mean, in that they have bigger apparent improvements in control conditions just because they can only stay the same or get better.