- Parkinson's disease affects every part of your life
from when you get up in the morning to when you go to bed at night.
Everything you do.
- I think I'm a pretty independent person normally.
But gradually, I became more and more dependent on other people to help me.
- We need our heart, we need our lungs but our brains are what makes us human.
The movement disorders is a very human aspect of neurology.
How do we sit? How do we stand?
How do we communicate?
- Daily chores were becoming very difficult.
For instance, brushing my teeth and shaving.
I couldn't do it anymore, I thought I was going to have to have my wife shave me.
When I first met Ray he had such a severe tremor it was completely disabling.
He couldn't run anymore, in fact he could hardly walk.
- It got so bad that I would have to go like this at night to hold my head still so I could go to sleep.
- Normal things such as buttons became my enemy.
Took my anywhere from half an hour to an hour to get dressed every day.
- He had difficulty with most of the hallmark features of Parkinson's.
He had tremor, stooped posture, muscle stiffness and slowness.
- Someone with Parkinson's disease when they're first diagnosed
may go on medications to help replace the dopamine that's lost.
They'll often describe themselves as essentially normal.
But as time goes by and they become resistant to the medications,
they'll get a very small window of time where they feel like they're normal or on.
- I was taking eight pills a day and wasn't getting relief from my shaking.
That's when I started to hear about DBS from my neurologist at Yale.
- Deep Brain Stimulation or DBS is the use of electrodes implanted within the brain to try to treat neurological disorders.
The stimulation is utilized to reduce over activity within certain areas of the brain to try to restore more normal function.
This represents a new technique where we interact with the brain rather than removing parts of the brain.
The stimuation provides us the ability to work with the intact system in the brain
and try to help treat diseases in that manner.
Not only am I a surgeon, but I'm also a physiologist
so that I can combine those two techniques
and understand the physiology but also know at the say time what's going on in the surgery
and put those two together to help create the best outcome for the patient.
First component of the Deep Brain Stimulation system is the electrode itself.
Patients are awake because we do real-time recordings from the brain in the operating room.
This helps us to put the electrode in the right location.
- Back up. Do it again.
Alright, good.
- Next thing I remember was the doctor checking my hand to see if it was working
and they said 'we got it. It's the right spot'
and they said, 'OK Ray, we'll see you later.'
- When you see someone have their symptoms treated almost instantaneously in the operating room,
you have this anticipation of seeing them come back to clinic
no walker, no wheelchair and no tremor is very rewarding.
- And on!
We have really good control of your tremor here.
Off.
On.
So it takes about three seconds but we get really good control of your tremor here.
- Trying to improve the patients' life is one of the most satisfying things we can do.
Knowing a patient before they had DBS and after they had DBS is sometimes like knowing a completely new person.
- The first surgery was wonderful, the second surgery at the end was like a miracle
because I stopped shaking entirely.
- I went back and they turned on the juice, the effects were virtually instantaneous.
- You feel that come on?
- Yeah. - What's that feel like?
- One side's shaking and my right side's just starting to shake,
all of a sudden it stopped.
- It's not a cure for Parkinson's, it masks the symptoms.
In my case, it masks them to the point where it really had a big effect on my lifestyle.
- We now have a technique that we're increasingly understanding how to utilize.
We're seeing this ever-expanding list of neurological diseases from which this can be applied.
- Even outside the realm of movement disorders, people are looking at ways
of treating dementia, psychiatric disorders, anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder.
- It's very rewarding to see patients be able to return to being who they are.
- I started running in 1976.
I think it's even more important since I became diagnosed with Parkinson's
because without running I don't think I'd be walking.
When I'm out running, it feels like I'm a normal human being.
I refuse to allow Parkinson's to change parts of my life that I really don't want to.