Alzheimer’s and Deep Brain Stimulation
The Toronto Western Research Institute study was published in the science journal Brain Stimulation. Dr. Andres M. Lozano led the study and said what inspired it was a desire to discover the effect of applying steady electrical pulses to the brain of an Alzheimer’s patient. Applying electrical impulses for Deep Brain Stimulation by using an implant has helped treat neurological conditions like Parkinson’s Disease.
In their study, Dr. Lozano and his team took six Alzheimer’s patients and inserted a pacemaker-powered implant into the hippocampus region of their brains, the region most affected by Alzheimer’s. The disease literally eats away at brains, in particular the hippocampus region.
After a year they were surprised to find the brains of two of their patients increased in size, by 5 to 8 percent, close to their size before they fell ill. And in those two patients their condition did not advance by much and they did not experience the degree of advancement of the disease the other four had. The brains of the other four continued to decrease in size.
“We think the reason for that is, as you’re more advanced, these circuits are completely destroyed as the illness progresses,” Dr. Lozano told CTV News. “So we think we went in too late in some of the patients.”
New study on Alzheimer’s
Such treatment would be expensive, but for now, learning that new nerve cells can be grown in the hippocampus and that the onset of the Alzheimer’s Disease appears to be slowed, even reversed, by Deep Brain Stimulation, is a positive step forward.
The team is conducting more research with more patients, 42, all of whom are at an early stage of the illness. Those results should be available in the spring.
