United States – The researchers said a new trial indicates that a brain implant powered by artificial intelligence would enable constant care for individuals with Parkinson’s disease.
How It Works:
These changes can lead to bad movements during the day and insomnia at night, which the implant tracks using AI and transmits to doctors, as the researchers explained, as reported by HealthDay.
When the device identifies an undesirable activity, it attenuates it with mild electrical shocks called deep brain stimulation (DBS).
In other words, it becomes a closed loop where the implant constantly suppresses symptoms as the Parkinsons patient gets on with his/ her daily activities, the researchers pointed out.
Promising Results from Phase 1 Trial:
A phase 1 study involving four patients showed that the implant cut the patients’ most complained of Parkinsonism by 50%, as detailed in Nature Medicine on August 16th.
“This is the future of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease,” said senior researcher Dr. Philip Starr, co-director of the UCSF Movement Disorders and Neuromodulation Clinic.
“There’s been a great deal of interest in improving DBS therapy by making it adaptive and self-regulating, but it’s only been recently that the right tools and methods have been available to allow people to use this long-term in their homes,” Starr said in a university news release.
Parkinson’s disease impacts approximately 10 million individuals globally, and results from the death of dopaminergic neurons within strong nuclei of the brain, as experts explained in background notes. Dopamine is a hormone that helps control movement in the body – or, at least, it does in humans.
As the dopamine levels begin to deplete, they begin to develop motor complications such as stiffness, tremors, and balance issues. They also develop symptoms such as depression and sleeplessness at other instances.
Some studies have found that deep brain stimulation decreases the amount of medication that PD patients require for their symptoms.
However, until now the implants introduced to persons with DBS have been a steady delivery of electric current without connection to the current condition of the patient. This can lead to sudden shifts of symptoms from one pole to another.
In fact, Starr has been preparing for this breakthrough for well over a decade.
In 2013, Starr and colleagues found a method to identify and monitor abnormal electrical activity common in Parkinson’s disease, and in 2021, they identified links between those patterns and the illness’s symptoms.
“The big shift we’ve made with adaptive DBS is that we’re able to detect, in real-time, where a patient is on the symptom spectrum and match it with the exact amount of stimulation they need,” said senior researcher Dr. Simon Little, an associate professor of neurology at UCSF.
The contemporary adaptive implant relies on signals coming from the motor cortex of the brain to set the level of stimulation delivered to the subthalamic nucleus, the part of the brain that controls movement.
In January this year, a study to this effect was published in Nature Communications, whereby it was revealed that the adaptive DBS implant helped alleviate insomnia in four Parkinson’s Disease patients, as reported by HealthDay.
Beyond Parkinson’s Disease
Scientists are now working on similar DBS treatments for other forms of brain illnesses.
“We see that it has a profound impact on patients, with potential not just in Parkinson’s but probably for psychiatric conditions like depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder as well,” Starr said. “We’re at the beginning of a new era of neuro-stimulation therapies.”