United States: In Parkinson’s disease, the dopamine producing brain cells lose their ability to function. It can cause any number of symptoms, although the most common are those affecting movement. Parkinson’s disease affects people in various ways, including trembling, stiff and/or rigid muscles in the arms and legs, slowness and/no control of movement, and problems with balance and coordination.
As reported by National Institutes of Health, one of the treatments that are recommended for people with Parkinson’s disease is deep brain stimulation or DBS for short. In DBS, insulated wires commonly known as electrodes are used and implanted on certain regions of the brain. These wires then send electrical impulses that may help minimize annoying movement disorders.
CDBS offers a continuous stream of electrical current into the brain which can be adjusted to certain amount. It does not follow inherent oscillations of the brain itself, or brain waves. It also does not take into consideration fluctuations in the doses of medications in the body of a Parkinson’s disease patients who may use drugs to increase dopamine in their bloodstream. They can however cause unfortunate movement effects.
Simon Little and Philip Starr’s researchers in University of CaliforniaSan Francisco has been working in the development of a new method known as adaptive DBS (aDBS). In aDBS, a machine learning system continuously performs monitoring the changes in the activity of the brain that is relevant to movement and makes the necessary correction in the stimulation process, for instance.
The system tracks movement in certain part of the brain known as the subthalamic nucleus and sensorimotor cortex. In measuring activity in these areas, the team noted that it was possible to predict bothersome motor symptoms.
The system then applies such information to alter further stimulation degrees to eradicate the symptoms. As part of a new investigation supported in part by the NIH’s BRAIN Initiative, the researchers sought to establish whether their technique would be effective in four patients with Parkinson’s disease for whom prior standard DBS failed to fully manage symptoms.
The systems could offer conventional or customised aDBS. Patients were then blinded within one month through the interchange of conventional DBS and aDBS in several days sequences.