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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

Developing new pathways for advanced surgical treatments: The Malta experience

Developing new pathways for advanced surgical treatment methods - experiences from malta

In Malta, with a population of approximately 700,000, a stereotactic ablation service for treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder was established through collaboration between psychiatry and neurosurgery, and one-third of the patients who underwent surgery achieved full remission.

The presentation describes how a pathway for advanced surgical interventions for psychiatric indications was established in Malta. The collaboration was initially established to provide deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease and was subsequently expanded to include stereotactic ablation for patients with severe, refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder. Under Malta’s Mental Health Act, every neurosurgical intervention for psychiatric indications requires the approval of the Commissioner for Mental Health. The Commissioner therefore appointed a working group to evaluate all applications for surgery for obsessive-compulsive disorder. The psychiatry and neurosurgery teams obtained approval by presenting the relevant literature and clinical findings from other countries, and all six applications submitted were approved. All of these patients had severe obsessive-compulsive disorder that was resistant to all medical and nonmedical interventions; outcomes varied: one-third of the patients achieved full remission, one-third achieved partial remission, and one-third did not respond to surgery. Malta is currently in the process of expanding these neurosurgical interventions to include the treatment of severe, refractory depression.

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