Description

In 1998, Dr. Philip A. Starr started putting electrodes in people’s brains. A neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Starr was treating people with Parkinson’s disease, which slowly destroys essential bits of brain tissue, robbing people of control of their bodies. At first, drugs had given his patients some relief, but now they needed more help.

After the surgery, Dr. Starr closed up his patients’ skulls and switched on the electrodes, releasing a steady buzz of electric pulses in their brains. For many patients, the effect was immediate. First developed in the early 1990s, deep brain stimulation, or D.B.S., was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating Parkinson’s disease in 2002. Since its invention, about 100,000 people have received implants. While D.B.S. doesn’t halt Parkinson’s, it can turn back the clock a few years for many patients. To treat Parkinson’s disease, neurosurgeons insert electrodes into a region called the basal ganglia, near the base of the brain. The disease kills a small patch of neurons in the basal ganglia that normally produce a neurotransmitter called dopamine. When people get Parkinson’s disease, the synchronization of the beta rhythm becomes stronger throughout the brain.

Dr. Starr and his colleagues wondered if this change might give rise to some of the symptoms of the disease. To find out, the scientists planned out a series of experiments during surgeries to implant D.B.S. devices. They temporarily placed a strip of sensors on the motor cortex and eavesdropped on the signals coming from neurons in different parts of that region of the brain. The scientists found that in people with Parkinson’s disease, parts of the motor cortex were more tightly synchronized than in people without the disease. This lockstep might help account for the problems people with Parkinson’s disease have with movement: Perhaps it’s hard for their brains to break out of synchronization and to generate a new pattern of signals that can start moving the body.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/science/clues-to-how-an-electric-treatment-for-parkinsons-works.html

Clues to How an Electric Treatment for Parkinson’s Works

Confirm copying