Word: braine
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Using DBS in severely brain-damaged patients may be a brand-new breakthrough, but the technology has already proved itself as a treatment for the tremors of Parkinson's disease, is nearing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and is in clinical trials as a therapy for depression. Studies suggest it could also help control symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, dystonia--or paralytic muscle rigidity--epilepsy and even some addictions. "DBS is like a pacemaker for the brain," says Cleveland Clinic neurosurgeon Ali Rezai, who performed the operation on the brain-damaged man. "We pinpoint...
...something that counts as brain surgery, a DBS procedure can be a surprisingly relaxed thing. On a recent morning in Cleveland, Scott Stipp, 55, a businessman and Parkinson's patient, lies lightly sedated on an operating table while Rezai and a team of surgeons drill a hole about as large as a dime in the crown of his head. Rezai then threads a wire just 4 microns thick--or four-thousandths of a millimeter--into Stipp's brain. Guided in part by CT scans and in part by real-time readings of electrical activity that the probe encounters...
...will be a bit of time before he's able to do it routinely. In a week he'll come back, and wires will be tunneled beneath his scalp, over his shoulder and to his chest, where a small pacemaker will be implanted. Three weeks later--after all possible brain swelling subsides--the power will be switched on, and the precise voltage needed to control his symptoms will be determined. Then it will simply be a matter of returning every few years for a battery change...
...undergone the procedure. But the operation is by no means a cure. For one thing, it doesn't do much for end-stage Parkinson's symptoms like cripplingly bad posture and difficulty swallowing. More important, Parkinson's is a degenerative condition, which means that while DBS neutralizes tremors, the brain continues to deteriorate beneath the mask of the treatment. After a decade or so, electrical stimulation is not enough to contain the disease. Still, that's 10 relatively symptom-free years during which other treatments may become available...
While OCD and depression patients would be required to exhaust all other remedies before opting for something as extreme as DBS, those suffering from traumatic brain injury have few such options. Right now, from 100,000 to 300,000 Americans have suffered sufficient brain trauma to be classified as minimally conscious--a number that is growing as soldiers wounded by shrapnel come home from Iraq. Twenty percent of minimally conscious patients recover well enough to return to the community and resume their lives. Others never do. Still others drift at the functional margins, needing just a boost to cross...