DBS has been used to treat diseases like Parkinson's
and essential tremor since the early nineties in the U.S.
And it's it's an adjustable therapy that's delivering electrical stimulation
to certain parts of the brain to help with symptoms of these diseases.
The brain wires
and the wires connecting the brain wires to the battery, though, stay the same
We had a patient recently
who had deep brain stimulation for his Parkinson's.
It helped him a fair bit.
The older style batteries, a lot of them are
what we call primary cell batteries.
So they're not rechargeable
This gentleman,
unfortunately, ended up in the hospital over the 4th of July weekend
because his battery had died and he didn't realize that.
And again, with Parkinson's patients, if you take away their deep
brain stimulation, it could be like not getting your medications.
And so he couldn't move.
He could you could barely raise his arms off the bed.
He wasn't talking It would take him about
30 seconds to say his name
and basically his he couldn't be at home
It kind of just coincided with the percept being released by the FDA
that he would be the first here.
But in general, with those patients, we try and replace those batteries
as soon as we can.
And once you do so, he was able to talk and move again.
So in terms of this this first case, it was kind of an urgent,
sort of unexpected replacement.
But it goes like any other battery replacements, an outpatient procedure,
usually
and you name the patient up here,
you remove the old battery, connect the new one, check the connections,
turn it back on, closes everything back up and you're done so it takes
about 20 minutes.
But that
can make the difference for him, you know, from being stuck
in the hospital to being the least get out of the hospital.
The patients, especially for Parkinson's, when you're
when you're getting these treatments, a lot of the reason people get DBS
is because their medications aren't controlling their their symptoms
in a very constant way.
They're they have what we call motor fluctuations.
So they're sometimes great, sometimes terrible and going back and forth.
And that unpredictability makes it very hard for them to
to stay active and continue with a good quality of life.
So, you know, deep brain stimulation in general increases
the amount of on time,
meaning increases the amount of time where they're feeling good
with their medications, without side effects, getting the benefits.
You know, DBS in general does that for them.
If we can make this work even better, then
again, we'd be increasing the quality of life of all these patients.
The purpose of this device, the reason that people came,
that they came up with this device is to
kind of reduce the burden on the patient and the doctor in terms of trying
to remember, you know, what times of day are good or bad for you.
Because the device itself can take snapshots of the brain activity
at certain points in time or the you can it's actually set up
so the patient can actually do that with their with their programing device,
which is it's basically a little it's a handheld tablet
and they can mark certain periods of time.
The device will record a
brief period of brain activity.
And the hope is to use that information to better guide therapy.
We target a specific part of the brain to put these wires in.
And we know that particular part of the brain in Parkinson's
has too much of a particular signal
doing deep brain stimulation reduces that signal.
Giving somebody their Parkinson's medications reduces that signal.
And we see people move better people have been looking at trying to use
brain signals themselves to tell if the treatment's effective.
And the percept device is kind
of a culmination of a lot of this work that people have done.
Where the device can provide stimulation and record
from the brain at the same time.
This is sort of objective, a piece of data
that we can use and we're not relying on the patient to do right stuff down.
Remember to write stuff down.
It makes it easier for them
having another piece of information to just therapy's really exciting
so potentially seeing what the brain is doing could give you a signal that, okay,
if we see this happen, odds are they will have fewer seizures
that could be an important thing to look for when trying to use
these types of devices, looking at what the brain is doing over time,
Could
could provide neurologists with a way to adjust medications,
the timing of when patients take them so that they
get more of the benefit without the side effects especially for Parkinson's,
we do a pretty good job of dealing with it overall.
You know, we know that DBS is safe.
We know it's effective, it works better
than just taking medications if you pick the right patients.
And this can just help make it even better.
No, the end goal for a lot of these things
want to have the machine do some of the adjustments itself.
To be able to do this without having the patient come into the,
you know, the clinic every time they want an adjustment.
And I think having information like this makes it
more more
feasible to consider doing things remotely