Deep brain stimulation has shown promise as a treatment for some symptoms of Parkinson s disease . However, not all symptoms improve equally well with DBS. A better understanding of how different sites of electrical stimulation impact the wide range of motor symptoms associated with PD could help fine-tune treatment. By studying PD patients at five different centers treated with DBS, investigators created an atlas that mapped four major symptoms of PD onto different regions of the brain.
"There is already strong evidence of improved quality of life for PD patients treated with DBS, but currently we still use a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to treatment," said senior author Andreas Horn, MD, PhD, a Mass General Brigham neurologist who holds titles at the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics in the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Axial symptoms, which have not received extensive study in relation to DBS, improved with stimulation of tracts connected to the supplementary motor cortex and brainstem. This finding may be especially important given that axial symptoms, such as gait or postural stability problems, typically do not respond well to DBS and existing dopaminergic therapies, such as levodopa.
A first-in-human trial of deep brain stimulation for post-stroke rehabilitation patients has shown that using DBS to target the dentate nucleus -- which regulates fine-control of voluntary ...