Part of the care is the kind of protocol people use to treat Parkinson's Disease. I think some doctors might not be too familiar with DBS as a treatment, therefore if you are not too familiar with DBS, it is much harder to offer. Sometimes there are misconceptions on the risk. Some people think it's extremely risky, but I think it really depends on your surgeons. If your surgeon has done a lot of this procedure and does it routinely, I would say it is a relatively safe procedure. I think awareness is important for what it can achieve, and I think those doctors with patients who have gone through DBS surgery have seen such a dramatic change in the patients. I think the reason why I'm doing this talk is to convey and convert more people into having DBS.
Question
What is stopping more health professionals from using deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's Disease patients?
Doctor's Answers 1
Similar Questions
Which hospital uses Magnetic Brain Stimulation to treat brain tumours in Singapore?
The most commonly used form of magnetic brain stimulation in clinical practice is transcranial magnetic stimulation (known as TMS). This makes use of Faraday's law of induction (if you remember from physics) to create current flow within the brain, which, in turn, excites the neurons (mostly cortical interneurons) over where the magnetic stimulation is applied. Magnetic stimulation by itself is not considered a treatment option for brain tumours. However, as an example, we have used transcranial magnetic stimulation prior to brain tumour surgery.
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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