Brain Surgery Found to Help Parkinson's Patients

Aug. 30, 2006 — -- Brain surgery might make the ordeal of Parkinson's disease a little easier for some patients, according to a study published in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

While several medications can help control the symptoms of this degenerative disease, they can produce side effects, including uncontrollable body movements that can be almost as disturbing as the shaking and tremors of the disease itself.

Parkinson's affects 1.5 million Americans. It can take away a person's ability to move by causing tremors, stiffness, shuffled walk, muffled speech. The new study confirms that a surgery to provide deep-brain stimulation, or DBS, might help when medications have failed.

"For patients and their families, this is a landmark study because it focuses on what is really important to them: quality of life. And it shows, very clearly, that DBS improves quality of life," said Dr. Jaimie Henderson, director of stereotactic and functional neurosurgery at Stanford University Medical Center.

The study followed 156 patients with severe Parkinson's disease, all under the age of 75. Half of the patients took medications to manage their disease, while the others received DBS.

During the procedure, a battery-operated neurostimulator is surgically implanted into the brain. That stimulator can improve motor symptoms in some Parkinson's patients by blocking the abnormal nerve signals that cause tremors and other symptoms.

According to the study, patients treated with this surgery had better mobility, quality of life and emotional well-being than the patients who received standard medications.

Most doctors already know that deep-brain stimulation helps Parkinson's patients, but this study is the first to prove that the surgery brings greater overall benefits.

"This may be the first published article to demonstrate … that surgery is better than the best medical therapy," said Dr. Gordon Baltuch, director of the Center for Functional and Restorative Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania.