Essentially the criteria we look out for are Parkinson's patients we feel will greatly benefit from this. We are looking for patients who maybe have mobile fluctuations, meaning they have this “on-off” phenomenon. We want to make sure we do not treat patients with dementia because they do not respond as well to DBS and we want to exclude patients who have severe depression. Again, patients with depression should not have surgery until their depression is stable. So we eliminate those patients who aren't suitable.
However, for those patients who we find are suitable, we find that we can help them over 95% of the time. For those suitable, the success rate is very high in terms of being able to make a difference in their lives. We are not going to make a person completely normal but we are going to try to make them as normal as possible, that's what we are really aiming for.
