How neurologist Helen Brontë-Stewart is personalizing Parkinson’s treatment.
DBS is a technique developed in the 1980s and 1990s in which a surgeon inserts electrodes deep into areas of the brain that are affected by Parkinson’s, then connects them to a small, battery-powered device implanted in the chest that sends electrical pulses back to the brain. The stimulation helps modulate the electrical activity in the targeted brain area, reducing abnormal brain signals and, thus, symptoms. Krehbiel reached out to a neurologist who was conducting research on DBS: Helen Brontë-Stewart, a professor of neurology and neurological sciences who has spent much of her career seeking to understand, measure, and improve the brain’s control of movement in the body.
At the time, Brontë-Stewart was leading a multisite global clinical trial for a new and improved version of DBS called adaptive DBS (aDBS). In the original DBS system, the neurostimulator sends a steady stream of electrical pulses to either the subthalamic nucleus or the globus pallidus internus, two brain structures in the basal ganglia key to motor control. But with Parkinson’s, patients’ motor symptoms change as they go through their daily activities, from waking to walking to driving a car, and as the effects of medication wax and wane.