Study: Brain implant helps manage Parkinson's symptoms

A brain implant guided by AI could provide around-the-clock personalized care for people with Parkinson 's disease , a new study suggests.

The implant uses AI to monitor a patient's brain activity for changes that can cause movement problems during the day and insomnia at night, researchers said.

When the device spots troubling activity, it intervenes with precisely calibrated pulses of electricity called deep brain stimulation (DBS).

In essence, the implant creates a "closed loop" in which symptoms are continuously tamped down as Parkinson's patients go about their daily lives, researchers said.

An early-stage clinical trial in four people found that the implant reduced their most bothersome Parkinson's symptoms by 50%, according to findings published Friday in the journal Nature Medicine .

"This is the future of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease," said senior researcher Dr. Philip Starr , co-director of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Movement Disorders and Neuromodulation Clinic.

"There's been a great deal of interest in improving DBS therapy by making it adaptive and self-regulating, but it's only been recently that the right tools and methods have been available to allow people to use this long-term in their homes," Starr said in a university news release.

Parkinson's disease affects about 10 million people worldwide, and arises from the loss of dopamine-producing neurons in deep regions of the brain, researchers explained in background notes. Dopamine is a hormone that helps coordinate movement in the body.

As dopamine levels decline, people start to develop movement problems like tremors, muscle stiffness and impaired balance. They also develop other symptoms like depression and insomnia.

Deep brain stimulation has been shown to reduce the amount of medication that Parkinson's patients need for their symptoms.

However, until now DBS implants have been designed to provide a constant level of electrical stimulation, rather than to adapt to a person's current symptoms. This can cause symptoms to veer from one extreme to the other.

Starr's research has been laying the groundwork for this breakthrough for more than a decade.

In 2013, Starr and colleagues developed a way to detect and record abnormal brain rhythms associated with Parkinson's, and in 2021 they tied specific brain patterns to the disease's motor symptoms.

"The big shift we've made with adaptive DBS is that we're able to detect, in real time, where a patient is on the symptom spectrum and match it with the exact amount of stimulation they need," said senior researcher Dr. Simon Little , an associate professor of neurology at UCSF.

The current adaptive implant uses signals from the brain's motor cortex to guide the amount of stimulation it provides to the subthalamic nucleus, the deep brain region that coordinates movement.

Earlier this year, findings published in the journal Nature Communications showed that the adaptive DBS implant could successfully reduce insomnia in four patients with Parkinson's disease.

Researchers are now developing similar DBS treatments for a range of brain disorders.

"We see that it has a profound impact on patients, with potential not just in Parkinson's but probably for psychiatric conditions like depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder as well," Starr said. "We're at the beginning of a new era of neuro-stimulation therapies."

More information

The Michael J. Fox Foundation has more about Parkinson's disease .

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