Award Winning Consultant Psychiatrist. Founder, Inventor and Medical Director
Dr Andy Zamar is an award-winning consultant psychiatrist and the founder and Medical Director of The London Psychiatry Centre, 72 Harley Street. He specialises in treatment-resistant depression and bipolar spectrum disorder, and is the inventor of The Zamar Protocol®. In 2011 he established the UK’s first neuromodulation unit.
Who is Dr Andy Zamar?
Triple qualified. Five clinical languages. One field-defining protocol
Qualifications:
MBBCh, LRCP, MRCS, MRCPsych
Dr Zamar is triple qualified in medicine in Egypt (Cairo University), the UK and the USA.
GMC number:
3637384
Awards:
Gaskell Gold Medal and Prize – RCPsych
(recognised as one of the foremost academic distinctions in clinical psychiatry)
Memberships:
Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (honour roll)
Special interests: EMDR, Treatment-resistant depression, General adult psychiatry, The Zamar Protocol, Mood disorders, Anxiety disorders, Bipolar disorder, ADHD, PTSD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Trauma
Languages:
Dr Zamar is one of the very few psychiatrists who are truly multilingual. He regularly consults and treats patients in English, French, Italian, Greek, classical and colloquial Arabic.
Areas of expertise
Dr Zamar is a world expert in the treatment of resistant affective disorders including depression and bipolar spectrum disorder.
He also has special expertise in the diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD, anxiety disorders, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and adjustment disorders due to exposure to adverse life consequences and distress pursuant to crises such as workplace bullying, extramarital affairs, failed IVF and others.
He is fully accredited in EMDR and since 2002, has been treating severe trauma following exposure to adverse civilian events such as accidents, medical/surgical complications, crimes, natural disasters and terrorist attacks as well military events. He also treats sexual dysfunction.
What patients say about Dr Andy Zamar
Pioneering research & publications
Together with his team, Dr Andy Zamar has introduced and pioneered a number of new technologies to the UK including rTMS, The Zamar Protocol® and eTNS.
rTMS: He oversaw the introduction of rTMS into the provisional NICE guidelines for the treatment of depression with Dr Rafael Euba acting as the National Advisor for NICE.
The Zamar protocol®: He developed a world’s first model for mood disorders involving precision medicine and mitochondrial treatment with thyroid hormones and rTMS (patent application pending). This is backed by the outcomes of a cohort of 55 patients – the first ever published study showing full recovery of severe mixed and depressive symptoms in all forms of bipolar disorder with a 96.4% success rate. He was also invited by the World Psychiatric Association to lecture on the subject. Dr Zamar is a member of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry (WFSBP) task force on Neuroprogression in Psychiatric Disorders.
Note: Dr Zamar publishes under the name Antonis Zamar.
Key research papers
Paper: A Different rTMS protocol for a different type of depression: 20.000 rTMS pulses for the treatment of bipolar depression type II
Theodoros Koutsomitros, Kenneth T. van der Zee, Olympia Evagorou, Teresa Schuhmann, Antonis Zamar, Alexander T. Sack. 2022, Special Issue “Advances in Clinical Management of Bipolar Disorder”, Journal of Clinical Medicine.
What it means: This study found that a shorter four-week course of the non-invasive treatment rTMS is safe and successfully reduces depression symptoms in people with bipolar disorder type II.
Paper: A new approach for the treatment of subthreshold bipolar disorders: Targeted high dose levothyroxine and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for mitochondrial treatment
Andy Zamar, Abbi Lulsegged, Christos Kouimtsidis. 2022, Frontiers in Psychiatry.
What it means: This paper discusses how combining rTMS with targeted doses of levothyroxine could provide a safe and effective new treatment option for people with hard-to-treat, milder forms of bipolar disorder by helping to restore cell energy.
Paper: A new treatment protocol of combined high-dose levothyroxine and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for the treatment of rapid-cycling bipolar spectrum disorders: A cohort evaluation of 55 patients
Antonis Zamar, Christos Kouimtsidis, Abbi Lulsegged, Robin Roberts, Theodoros Koutsomitros, Daniel Stahl. 2022, Special Issue “Advances in Clinical Management of Bipolar Disorder”, Journal of Clinical Medicine.
What it means: This study evaluated 55 patients and found that combining rTMS with high doses of levothyroxine is a safe and highly effective treatment that led to long-term symptom relief for people with hard-to-treat, rapid-cycling bipolar disorder.
Paper: Towards the first biomarker test for bipolar spectrum disorder: An evaluation of 199 patients in an outpatient setting
Andy Zamar, Asha Mohamed, Abbi Lulsegged, Daniel Stahl, Christos Kouimtsidis. Special issue: “Pharmacogenomics and Precision Medicine in Psychiatry: From Basic Research to Clinical Practice”, Journal of Personalized Medicine, 2023.
What it means: This study addresses the challenges of diagnosing bipolar spectrum disorder, and identifies specific genetic mutations related to thyroid function that could serve as the first reliable biomarker test to help doctors accurately diagnose the disorder and tell it apart from standard recurrent depression.
Paper: Treatment-resistant depression: Experience of the first repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation clinic in the UK
Rafael Euba, Irina Panihhidina & Andy Zamar. 8 May 2015, Future Medicine.
What it means: This study found that rTMS is a safe and highly effective “real-world” treatment that helped 66% of patients with treatment-resistant depression achieve full recovery.
Timeline of innovation
Speaking engagement highlights
Dr Andy Zamar presented his talk ‘Bipolar disorder: inflammatory markers and clinical implications’, on 6th March at the 11th Congress on Neurobiology, Psychopharmacology & Treatment Guidance in Thessaloniki, Greece.
The talk was part of the symposium ‘Inflammation and depression: multilevel sequelae, biomarkers and treatment strategies’.
The congress aims to provide a comprehensive update on the newest developments in psychiatry, with a core focus on empowering patients and relieving them and their families from the burden of mental illness.
Dr Andy Zamar, and Dr Abbi Lulsegged, Consultant Physician in endocrinology, were invited to speak at the prestigious 2022 WPA Thematic Congress in Malta (10-12th November 2022).
They presented a symposium on “Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) and High Dose Thyroid Hormones, a new horizon of innovative therapies for the treatment of Bipolar Depression”.
They were also joined by Dr Theodoros Koutsomitros who spoke on “Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) – a new era of therapies in bipolar depression”.
Background
Dr Andy Zamar was born in Egypt to a Greek mother and Lebanese father and was educated at a French Catholic school in Cairo (College Des Freres Saint Jean Baptiste de La Salle). His early exposure to a wide and diverse cultural environment developed into a profound understanding of the varied cultural presentations of distress and psychiatric disorders.
Dr Zamar has held a number of NHS Consultant posts and was a Staff Consultant at the Priory Hospital Roehampton for 10 years where he had a proven record of treating resistant and difficult to treat cases. During his tenure, Dr Zamar introduced a number of recognised interventions and treatments for resistant anxiety disorders, resistant depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD and adult ADHD which remain a standard practice at the Priory till today. He was also appointed Consultant at The London Clinic hospital in Devonshire Place offering an integrated psychiatric service to their patients.
