Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is substantially more effective for
treating advanced Parkinson’s disease than the best available
nonsurgical treatments but comes with a much greater risk of
serious side effects, according to a new study. DBS, in which
electrodes are implanted in the brain, has been used for more
than a decade to help manage the characteristic movement
problems of Parkinson’s. Though many of the details remain
mysterious, the electrical stimulation somehow blocks aberrant
signals thought to underlie the disease’s symptoms. Compared
with what the researchers cite as the “best medical therapy”—a
regimen of medications and behavioral treatments—patients
treated with DBS gained about 4.6 hours of symptom-free time
each day, the scientists report in the Jan. 7 issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association. “This is pretty
significant,” says lead researcher Frances Weaver, a
psychologist at the Hines Veterans Affairs Hospital in Illinois.
“We’re generally awake for about 16 hours in a day.