From one-size-fits-all psychiatry to stratified psychiatry: Brain markers and heart-brain-coupling
Session Chair
11/3/22, 2:00 PM - 11/3/22, 2:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) (30 minutes)

Martijn Arns, PhD
Researcher Director and Founder of Research Institute Brainclinics Associate Professor, Faculty of Psychology & Neuroscience, Maastricht University
Researcher Director and Founder of Research Institute Brainclinics Associate Professor, Faculty of Psychology & Neuroscience, Maastricht University

Martijn is Research director at the Brainclinics Foundation and associate professor at Maastricht University, Faculty of

Psychology & Neuroscience. His main interest is Stratified Psychiatry and Precision Psychiatry for Depression and ADHD, and brain

stimulation techniques such as rTMS.


Given relatively modest remission rates for antidepressant treatments available, there is a need for approaches that

help tailor existing treatments to the individual in order to improve remission rates. In addition, such techniques should be clinically

actionable and well validated in blinded out-of-sample validations. Here we introduce the concept of Stratified Psychiatry, that is

better suited for implementation in clinical practice, and demonstrate that Brainmarker-I, an EEG biomarker, can successfully help

stratify patients between 1-Hz right and 10-Hz left rTMS, as well as for ECT and various other antidepressant treatments, as a

clinically actionable stratification marker. Furthermore, a novel update of NCG-TMS called Heart-Brain Coupling is introduced that

provides real time evidence of frontal-vagal activation, simply measured using an iPhone app. This technique not only helps identify

the right target for frontal-vagal activation, but also provides frontal excitability thresholds (which are known to differ substantially

from motor-thresholds).