Neuro-cardiac guided rTMS as a stratifying method between the ‘5cm’ and ‘BeamF3’ stimulation clusters

Fitzgerald [1] reviewed the question ‘Targeting repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation in depression: do we really know what we are stimulating and how best to do it?‘. Two clusters of stimulation targets in use for rTMS treatment in major depressive disorder (MDD) emerge, one surrounding the more posterior ‘5-cm’ rule and another surrounding the more anterior ‘Beam-F3’ target. Given the fact that large effectiveness studies have demonstrated comparable response (47–58 %) and remission (29–37 %) rates for the ‘Beam-F3’ cluster [2] and ‘5-cm’ cluster [3] respectively, we hypothesize if these comparable rates could be explained by inter-individual differences.