Deep Brain Stimulation: May Provide Lasting Health Benefits in Parkinson’s

The news source is WebMD and research was done by University of Toronto.

Researchers at University of Toronto have studied the benefits of having a deep brain stimulator implanted to patients with Parkinson’s disease. It was between year 1996 and 2000 that they checked and fitted the deep brain stimulators on a group of 18 patients with Parkinson’s who showed a lasting health benefits for a decade.

Parkinson’s is a debilitating disease that can affect individual after the age of 50 resulting to symptoms like difficulty with speech, stiffness, slowness, and tremors.

The patients with deep brain stimulators were tested under different conditions such as with medication and brain stimulator turned off, without medications but with stimulator on, with medication but with stimulator off, and both medication and brain stimulation turned on. These were videotaped as they performed their daily physical movements and then scored by a doctor who didn’t know the patient’s condition. After a decade, the researchers have seen the improvement with the deep brain stimulation about 23% for slowness, 25% for overall movement, and 85% for tremors.

According to the study researcher Andres M. Lozano, MD, PhD, patients with Parkinson’s improved lasting for a decade with the deep brain stimulator on compared to those stimulators off. Dr. Alon Mogilner also has seen the same benefits to his patients. Dr. Michael Rezak also agreed and added that medications can be reduced significantly.

The deep brain stimulator is a device that sends impulses to the brain which block abnormal signals responsible for the disease’s symptoms. It costs between $30,000 and $50,000 and currently, about 90,000 people have received the deep brain stimulation.

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