Zapping Disease with Electricity

Reported October

CLEVELAND, OH (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- There are medications for almost everything, but for conditions that start in the brain, the side effects can be near-disabling, and benefits often diminish with time. Electricity is changing the way doctors treat neurological conditions like Parkinson's, chronic headaches, back pain and epilepsy. The newest way to treat disease can't be found in a pill bottle.

“I couldn't feed myself,“ Mike Bates told Ivanhoe. “I couldn't button buttons.“

“It comes very quickly,“ Kassie Adams told Ivanhoe. “One minute you're OK. The next minute, you have a pounding headache."

“It was just ... it was really unbearable. It was terrible,“ Bud Alvarez explained to Ivanhoe.

Tremor, migraines, back pain -- conditions that leave their victims desperate for relief. Medications are a solution for some, but not all.

“They can have side effects," Ali Rezai, M.D., Neurosurgeon at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, told Ivanhoe. "They can not be as beneficial. They can cost a lot of money, and medications are really a non-specific way of treating the brain,“

The brain is the body's source of pain and neurological symptoms like tremor. Increasingly, doctors and patients are treating the brain-generated problems with electricity.

“Electricity is the language of the brain,“ Dr. Rezai explained.

Dr. Rezai says electrical stimulation works by sending a signal to the area of the brain that calms the electrical 'storm' of activity caused by conditions like Parkinson's, epilepsy, migraines and chronic pain.

“I think just like heart pacemakers really transformed the way cardiac disorders are being treated, neurological pacemakers are going to have a significant role in the future in treating many disorders of the nervous system,“ Dr. Rezai said.

They're already fulfilling that role. A year after having a stimulator device implanted to control his tremor, Mike Bates can button buttons and write again.

“It's like day and night,“ Bates described. “It's like being reborn.“

A life-changing treatment gets to the root of the problem. Dr. Rezai says doctors are starting to use implantable nerve stimulators to treat psychiatric disorders like depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He says the technique may also be used in the future to treat eating disorders.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Ali R. Rezai
Neurological Surgery
Ohio State University
Medical Center
rezai.5@osu.edu

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