What are common concerns patients should consider before undergoing deep brain stimulation?

Doctor's Answers 1

To feel anxiety before surgery is normal. I would be more concerned if my patients are not worried about having surgery and I make sure they fully understand what they are going through. And the most frequent thing is the idea of surgery, their concern on the surgery and what is around it and also some questions on recovery. What I do tell them is that this surgery, if you think about it, is quite minimally invasive. Just two thin small wires going into the brain, the opening in the skull is small and the battery itself will go under the skin. In fact, the recovery is fast, so even elderly patients go home within a few days after the surgery and that helps them for many years or much longer. Let me rephrase this, they look forward to what happens afterwards.

Read more in this guide about Deep Brain Stimulation

Similar Questions

Who is a good candidate for DBS (deep brain stimulation)?

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.

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Answered By

Dr Nicolas Kon

Neurosurgeon

What is the cut off age requirement for deep brain stimulation?

Traditionally, we kind of set an age limit of 70 years old, meaning that beyond that we would say that maybe they should not get DBS because it might not be able to help. Over time we became more flexible with age limits, and have done DBS for patients in their mid to late 70s to help them. The amount of help DBS can give often diminishes as the patient ages.

Photo of Dr Nicolas Kon

Answered By

Dr Nicolas Kon

Neurosurgeon

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