A study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that deep brain stimulation, a therapy in which an device is implanted in the brain to send electrical impulses to different parts of the organ, can help Parkinson’s patients earlier in the disease than previously believed.
The patients still had severe disease (a 3 on a 1 to 5 scale), had been sick for at least four years, and were starting to stop responding to their medicines. The researchers tracked 251 patients with Parkinson’s for an average of 7.5 years after they were treated with drug therapy, or drugs plus deep-brain stimulation with Medtronic Inc.’s Kinetra or Soletra devices. Quality of life improved significantly for those getting both treatments, while it worsened slightly for those given only drugs, according to the study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The observed difference between the treatment groups is thus due to an improvement among patients receiving neurostimulation,” said the researchers led by Michael Schuepbach, from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie and Inserm in Paris. As a main benefit from the patient’s perspective, activities of daily living were improved among patients with neurostimulation in the worst condition during the day.
