New study indicates advance in Parkinson's treatment

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system and effects the sufferer's motor skills, speech and other functions.  It's estimated up to four million people, worldwide, have the disease.  The disease is typically treated with drugs like Levodopa but deep brain stimulation surgery, the implantation ot electrodes into the patient's brain, has been used more sparingly in advanced Parkinson's cases.

A new study to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests Parkinson's sufferers showed significant improvement, more so than with drug treatments, following deep brain stimulation surgery. 

Patients with advanced Parkinson's disease who received deep brain stimulation showed greater improvement in movement and quality of life after six months than those treated with medication, a new study shows.

With deep brain stimulation, doctors surgically implant electrodes that send electrical stimulation to specific parts of the brain to reduce involuntary movements and tremors. It is a widely accepted treatment for advanced Parkinson's disease, but few randomized trials have been conducted comparing different treatments.

Lead study author Frances Weaver said researchers were surprised by the magnitude of the differences in outcomes between the surgical and medical treatments. "The amount of time that patients were able to move normally increased by 4.6 hours," said Weaver, director of the Center for Management of Complex Chronic Care at Hines VA Hospital near Maywood. "Our best medical therapy patient, on average, showed no improvement."

The new research is the first to show that deep brain stimulation works as well in older patients as in younger ones, said Dr. Leo Verhagen, a neurologist and medical director of the movement disorders surgery program at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

"It's a major step forward," said Verhagen, who was not involved with the study. (Link)

Good stuff.