BarcelonaParkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease that attacks dopamine-producing neurons, which are responsible for controlling movement. It has no cure and affects patients differently, with a wide range of symptoms, but it always has a total impact on the quality of life of patients and their immediate environment. Now a study from the University of California, San Francisco opens the door to the possibility of improving the quality of life for these people: researchers have developed a smart implantable device regulated by brain activity that can provide continuous and personalized treatment against Parkinson’s movement and insomnia problems. According to the conclusions of the work published in the journal Natural medicineThe new treatment reduces these symptoms by 50%.
This type of treatment, called adaptive deep brain stimulation (aDBS), is an improvement on a technique that has been used for years for these patients. The new device monitors the patient’s brain activity and, when it detects problems, intervenes with electrical pulses. In this way, it creates a mechanism that can reduce symptoms as they occur. The treatment is supplemented by medication and regulates the level of stimulation in real time with the information it receives from the brain, unlike the traditional technique, which provides a constant level of stimulation and can cause unwanted side effects, since the brain does not always require the same intensity of treatment.
The researchers tested the new technology in a clinical trial with four people receiving conventional treatment, and found that the device reduced symptoms by half. Additionally, although they were not told which type of treatment they were receiving at each time point, three of the four participants correctly guessed when they had received the new treatment because they saw a significant improvement in their symptoms. However, the researchers caution that there are still significant challenges to making this treatment more widely available, despite the promising results they have obtained.
“New Era”
The study was led by Philip Starr, professor of neurosurgery and co-director of the Movement Disorders and Neuromodulation Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, who has been studying the technology for more than a decade. Starr told Efe that the new device can recognize brain activity associated with different sleep states and other patterns that indicate a person is likely to wake up in the middle of the night, and could therefore be used to relieve insomnia in other patients who do not have Parkinson’s but have difficulty sleeping. In fact, they are developing similar treatments for other neurological disorders. “This technology has a profound impact on patients, with potential not only for Parkinson’s disease, but also perhaps for psychiatric conditions such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder,” the researcher concludes. “It’s the beginning of a new era of neurostimulation therapies.”
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