Trying brain pacemakers to zap psychiatric disease
Just over 60 people with intractable obsessive-compulsive disorder have undergone deep brain stimulation (“DBS”) since 2000, says Dr. Benjamin Greenberg, a Brown University psychiatrist who is heading a major study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. About three-fourths of the first few dozen patients studied significantly improved, some as long as eight years.“You still have a burden, but you have a life,” is how Greenberg describes the improvement.
Unlike with tremor patients, the psychiatric patients who respond to DBS tend to improve gradually, sometimes to their frustration. Behavioral therapy is still necessary. Dr. Greenberg says that with the brain pacemaker, somehow behavior therapy starts working, — maybe by enabling patients’ brains to better remember the lessons.
Drawbacks: the surgery could cause dangerous brain bleeding or infections. Also, the battery which is tucked near the collarbone currently tends to last less than two years. Changing it entails outpatient surgery, one reason that about a third of studied patients stop getting zapped.
