Electrical jolts to the spine transform the lives of Parkinson's patients in Canadian-led experiments
Gail Jardine says it’s a bit like changing the channels on a television. Never has wielding a remote control, however, been so life altering.
“I walk with my husband,” said the 66-year-old London, Ont., resident Thursday. “I can go around the house without a cane. I can play with my grandkids, do all the things I used to do.” But he says the results to date have been surprisingly promising, making dramatic improvements in many of the patients enrolled in his trials.
But the drugs do little for gait problems such as those Jardine had, and deep-brain stimulation can actually make them worse, Jog said. With an out-patient procedure that takes about an hour, electrodes are implanted in the spine. Patients use the “remote control” to adjust the frequency, as well as turn on and off the generator when they wake in the morning and at night .
Still, there are skeptics. In a letter to the journal that published the Western paper, Dr. Erich Talamoni Fonoff of Brazil’s University of Sao Paulo acknowledged the idea’s promise but noted “it is well known that some PD symptoms can improve remarkably with placebo.”
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