Deep Brain Stimulation in Alzheimer’s Disease
Read a review on the use of deep brain stimulation (DBS). Wrote a lot of posts about this new treatment on this blog, mostly for treatment resistant depression. As with most new treatment options the new treatment is tried with other severe diseases. You can probably find some on this blog or down this post in the related posts section. The use of DBS in Alzheimer’s disease drew my attention. Stimulating certain brain regions in a disease with a neurodegenerative character seems almost impossible.
This review was written by members of the Canadian group who also published about the use of DBS in treatment resistant depression. They stimulated certain brain regions serving cognitive and memory functions (the fornix, part of the Papez memory circuit) in six patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
After 1 year of chronic high-frequency stimulation, glucose hypometabolism within the temporoparietal cortex that is characteristic of the diseased brain was largely reversed
Two patients improved on the Mini Mental State Examination, three others declined and one was unchanged. The average decline on points of the MMSE suggest a delay of this cognitive decline for these patients.
It was just a pilot study and needs further research. The authors have started a large multicenter trial
J. Schouenborg, M. Garwicz and N. Danielsen (Eds.)
Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 194
Deep brain stimulation: emerging indications
Travis S. Tierney, Tejas Sankar and Andres M. Lozano
Flickr
Twitter
RSS
LinkedIn
GoodReads
Last
December 31, 2011 @ 8:27 pm
hello every one – hope yous had a good christmas – pity we didnt get snow was all prepared wi sledges kids loving it any ways , all the best for new year – michael
News Round Up 2011 « The Amazing World of Psychiatry: A Psychiatry Blog
January 2, 2012 @ 6:52 pm
[…] There is evidence that Deep Brain Stimulation may be associated with neurogenesis in the Hippocampus. There is a write-up of one study which provides preliminary evidence of a benefit from Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in post-stroke dysphagia. This was a small trial and it will be interesting to see the results of further studies in this area. Researchers used EEG and fMRI to investigate lucid dreamers. The lucid dreamers were scanned whilst asleep and signalled that they were dreaming of clenching their fists by moving their eyes horizontally several times. Only two episodes were captured but they displayed similar activity to hand clenching. However these results should be viewed with caution as only two episodes were captured and it will be interesting to see the results of replication studies. ‘Brain reading’ which is a combination of using neuroimaging data and making predictions based on analysis using artificial intelligence software is discussed in this article in relation to recent research into alcohol use and craving. In a freely available paper researchers used fMRI to investigate imaging of future events (via MariaPage). They found evidence that when subjects had successfully recalled their imagined future events there was evidence that the right Hippocampus was activated. The researchers suggest that the Hippocampus is used to store the details of these imagined events. This continues the debate on the role of hippocampus in imagining future events. In another study the researchers examined the visual perception of objects. Visual information in the form of parts of a car were presented to the subjects with a number of transformations making it more difficult to identify the moving objects. In order to process the visual information the researchers suggested on the basis of their evidence that the visual information was being grouped and that the subjects were processing the data at a rate of about 10 groups per second. Furthermore the groups were being processed one at a time. If this is replicated then it means that when we perceive visual motion – for instance a group of cars driving down the road we would be processing them not as a group of cars moving but a sequential processing of individual cars. However the brain may have additional techniques for processing ‘natural’ visual information in contrast with the abstract information presented in this experiment. Researchers examining the auditory processing areas in the cerebral cortex in humans have better characterised the processing activities. Much like the processing of vision, the processing of sound involves ‘what’ and ‘where’ streams. The researchers in the study reported on here have investigated the ‘what’ stream and identified three components which analyse basic tones, multiple tones and speech sounds such as vowels. This better understanding will be useful into a number of illnesses in which speech is affected. Dr Shock has a piece on Deep Brain Stimulation in Alzheimer’s Disease here. […]
January 18, 2012 @ 6:00 pm
I am 76 and had shock treatment. It had a negative effect on my younger life. I had my music lyrics memorized and that was eliminated. I had two years of Spanish wiped out. Good memories of my childhood…wiped out. Now I read that the elderly will be victims of shock for alzhiemer’s. What next ?I have been an advocate for people who experience mental illness. A group of us started a drop-in center..Keystone in Kalamazoo, Michigan. That was an asset for people. It has expanded from its beginnings offering more programs.
January 18, 2012 @ 9:16 pm
Dear Elizabeth,
Thanks for your comment. Deep Brain Stimulation is different from shock therapy. It’s an operative procedure done by a neurosurgeon. Take care Dr Shock