Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a surgical treatment involving the implantation of a medical device called a brain pacemaker, which sends electrical impulses to specific parts of the brain. DBS in select brain regions has provided remarkable therapeutic benefits for otherwise treatment-resistant movement and affective disorders such as chronic pain, Parkinson's disease, tremor and dystonia. Despite the long history of DBS, its underlying principles and mechanisms are still not clear. DBS directly changes brain activity in a controlled manner, its effects are reversible (unlike those of lesioning techniques) and is one of only a few neurosurgical methods that allows blinded studies.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved DBS as a treatment for essential tremor in 1997, for Parkinson's disease in 2002, and dystonia in 2003. DBS is also routinely used to treat chronic pain and has been used to treat various affective disorders, including major depression. While DBS has proven helpful for some patients, there is potential for serious complications and side effects.
Read more about Deep Brain Stimulation: Components and Placement, Biochemistry, Potential Complications and Side Effects
Other articles related to "deep brain stimulation, brain, stimulation":
... The support for the use of deep brain stimulation in treatment-resistant depression comes from a handful of case studies, and this treatment is still in a very early investigational stage ...
... side of the body (opposite the side of the brain surgery), but bilateral pallidotomy was found to cause irreversible deterioration in speech and cognition ... two other potential rapidly evolving surgical approaches to Parkinson's disease such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) and restorative therapies ... Stimulation of portions of the Thalamus or lesioning has been used for various psychiatric and neurological conditions, and when practiced for movement disorders the target is in the motor nuclei ...
... Because the brain can shift slightly during surgery, there is the possibility that the electrodes can become displaced or dislodged ... may also be complications of surgery, such as bleeding within the brain ... After surgery, swelling of the brain tissue, mild disorientation and sleepiness are normal ...
... Deep brain stimulation is a surgical technique used to alleviate patients from phantom limb pain ... to surgery, patients undergo functional brain imaging techniques such as PET scans and functional MRI to determine an appropriate trajectory of where pain is originating ... electrode with four contact points was placed on the brain ...
Famous quotes containing the words stimulation, deep and/or brain:
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The shepherd is the brain behind the dog’s brain,
But his control of dog, like dog’s of sheep
Is never absolute—that’s the beauty of it.”
—Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)