Correction to: Neuropsychopharmacology (2002) 27, 874–878.

Recently, we published a report on the effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on plasma levels of neuroactive steroids in major depression (Padberg et al, 2002). We meanwhile noticed that the progesterone levels reported in Figure 2 in this paper were above those usually found in human plasma. We therefore have reanalyzed our GC/MS data. By doing so we found that, when switching from steroid analysis by GC/MS from the electron impact (EI) mode that was employed in our previous study in depression (Romeo et al, 1998) to the negative chemical ionization (NCI) mode, we made a mistake with the calculation of progesterone concentrations. In our paper (Padberg et al, 2002) we reported on calculations based on the ions that are characteristic for progesterone out of which the ion m/z 178 represents also pregnenolone which partially coelutes with progesterone. This explains why the progesterone values reported were too high. We now recalculated progesterone excluding m/z 178. The corrected mean progesterone concentrations are below 5 nmol/l as usually found in the literature. The other steroid concentrations reported (Padberg et al, 2002) are correct. We seriously apologize for this error. Nevertheless, we would like to emphasize that the recalculated progesterone data do not change the conclusions of this study that treatment with rTMS for 2 weeks does not affect plasma concentrations of neuroactive steroids in depressive patients. Figure 1

figure 1

Figure 1