Tag : DBS

Boston: The fifth most common cause of death for persons over 65 is Alzheimer's disease (AD). A relatively recent strategy tries to treat the brain, while many prospective treatments for neurodegenerative disease concentrate on creating medications to target major offenders. A neurosurgical procedure called deep brain stimulation (DBS) uses electrical stimulation of brain circuits to treat the symptoms of conditions including Parkinson's disease and obsessive-compulsive disorder. DBS has been used experimentally in AD patients with varying degrees of success and variability in cognitive outcomes. These various results could be the result of variations in electrode placements between people. Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, compared DBS targets in AD patients previously treated at seven international sites, finding that stimulating the intersection of two particular brain networks correlated with better patient outcomes than stimulating nearby sites. Findings are published in Nature Communications. "Not many Alzheimer's patients have been treated with DBS, and so isolating a targetable network and showing that it could be predictive of patient outcomes was exciting," said corresponding author Andreas Horn, MD, PhD, of the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics. "We refined an optimal DBS site, which future clinical trials of DBS may now use, going forward. If more patients are stimulated at this region, we may see clearer evidence across the group supporting the effectiveness of DBS." With the collaboration of colleagues from Toronto Western Hospital and six other centres, forty-six patients with mild AD treated with DBS to the fornix (fx-DBS) were included ...