Brain Science:
You may have seen recently, on one of the morning television shows, a new treatment for Parkinson's. Parkinson's disease attacks brain cells that make dopamine. You may recall that dopamine is a chemical that is key to nerve cell communication for functions like movement, mood and behavior.
Early on symptoms are presently treated with drugs that mimic dopamine. These drugs have negative side effects and dosage in most cases need to be increased as time goes on. When drugs become ineffective deep brain stimulation is the preferred treatment. Electrodes are implanted into the brain. Because of the risks of brain surgery, not all patients are eligible or choose the treatment and sometimes it does not work.
Researchers have developed a new tool to combat the symptoms of Parkinson's. A tremor suppression glove. The new glove, uses a series of motors and sensors to track voluntary movements and computers distinguish them from involuntary ones. The therapy involves stimulating the brain through vibrating gloves. Fingertips have many sensory neurons, which means a large portion of the sensory cortex of the brain is dedicated to receiving signals from them. The gloves stimulate voluntary behavior and suppresses involuntary. It sounds like science fiction but it so far has proved effective in stopping and eliminating tremors. Researchers have also been surprised to find the glove also alleviated mood swings, behavior changes, depression and loss of smell and taste.
The symptoms of Parkinson's arise when large groups of neurons ( brain cells) abnormally fire in unison. The team at Stanford has discovered that a patterned stimulus that vibrated at a frequency of 100 to 300 hertz ( cycles) can desynchronize neuron-firing. They have also learned that if the treatment is paused alternately that the effect of the treatment will become more permanent.
Brain Facts
In a 2014 study on humans, coordination reset stimulation (name for fingertip stimulation) was applied for three consecutive days in two daily sessions of up to two hours, it was found that the stimulation reduced the neural synchrony associated with Parkinson's and this correlated with improvement of motor function.
A more recent study of a of patients found that wearing the glove for two hours, twice a day does just that, alleviates the tremor, stiffness, abnormal walking, slow body movement and balance problems associated with Parkinson's.
Research, to this point, indicates there are no side effects from finger stimulation since it is not drug related or invasive.
About 70 percent of Parkinson's patients experience tremors.
The disease is typically found in older adults, and the average age of onset is 60 years old. However, it can occur in younger adults between 30 and 40 years old.
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease that affects roughly 1 million Americans. Neurodegenerative diseases lead to the progressive decline of the structure and function of the central and peripheral nervous systems, which deliver messages to and from the brain to the rest of the body.
Parkinson’s disease is not fatal, and your life expectancy depends highly on the type of Parkinson's you have. If the type of disease isn't causing issues with brain function, you can potentially live as long as people without the disease.
So What:
This glove thing seems too good to be true. But to this point science has backed up the claims. It is and has been a hard case to sell in some medical circles but testimonials to this point have been outstanding. The initial thought was that the therapy would be available in the summer of 2023. That looks a little optimistic but is, from what I can tell, achievable. One way around that is to participate in clinical trials which are now on going. For information about participating in a study of the glove’s effects, contact the Tass lab (https://med.stanford.edu/tass-lab.html) at parkinsonsvcr@stanford.edu. (per article " Good Vibrations ", Neurology& neurosurgery/ Issue2/2021). Holly MacCormick was the author. This article is a little dated but they are still in trial studies now. In some cases Medicare will pay for some case study treatments. There is a video on Utube titled "Coordinated Reset Vibrotactile Stimulation". If you know of someone who could benefit from this development please pass this on.
There seems to be a couple of streams of research on this therapy. One is out of Western University in Canada. This effort seems to be around the design of the glove. Most of the rest of research to this point is out of Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Peter Tass is spear heading the research there.
Again it is just simply amazing the research and development coming from the medical community today. With all the negative going on around us today Medical research and development is a shining bright spot.... Of course we don't know the cost yet of most of these developments. Lets hope these breakthroughs are affordable. We also have to understand that there has to to be a financial benefit to a company for heavy research or we would not be seeing this kind of development. Somewhere in there is a trade off. .
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