SALT LAKE CITY, Utah. (Ivanhoe Newswire)— Imagine your hands shaking so badly that you can’t hold a spoon steady to eat and you’re unable to read your own handwriting. This is reality for ten million people in the United States who suffer from essential tremors. It’s a debilitating disease that can affect every aspect of a person’s life. Now, there is an FDA approved, one-time treatment that can stop the shaking within seconds.
“Michelle, Kristin, Lynette, Todd, Laura, Stephanie…. ”
Janice Pedersen definitely doesn’t have a memory problem. She can name all 11 of her kids and 52 of her grandkids!
“We’ve got about every name you can think of in our family,” shared Pedersen.
But Janice’s life changed drastically when her kids were young, her hands started shaking in her forties.
“It got so bad that I couldn’t eat with utensils. The food would just fly off the fork,” Pedersen recalled.
A team at the University of Utah is using focused ultrasound, a non-invasive approach to help patients like Janice. When fellow patient Mark Armstrong got the procedure, more than a thousand ultrasound beams are focused on the part of his brain that’s causing the tremor.
“The area we’re targeting is a small part of the brain, the size of a pea. We do these procedures with the patient awake so we can get real time feedback with how we’re doing,” explained John Rolston, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon at University of Utah Health.
It was life-changing for Mark … as for Janice, her handwriting before was unreadable, but her handwriting improved during the procedure and is now beautiful once again. But this isn’t a cure.
“We just like to think that we’re able to set the clock back several decades and kind of reset the clock for these patients,” added Matt Alexander, MD a neurointerventional radiologist at University of Utah Health.
The FDA has approved treating the part of the brain that impacts each hand, one at a time … the hand that was treated for Janice is steady, the other hand is not. Janice is hoping to get her left hand treated soon, but for now, she is back to doing all the things she couldn’t do before.
“They told me, they said, you might see 50 percent improvement. But to me it feels like a hundred percent,” Pedersen shared.
Before focused ultrasounds, patients were dependent on medications and RF ablation that could damage other areas of the brain since it requires making an incision and drilling a hole into the skull. As for focused ultrasound, there’s very little risk, but patients may feel some tingling or experience instability for weeks afterwards. Also, not everyone with essential tremor is eligible for focused ultrasound. You may not be a good candidate if you have a pacemaker, kidney disease or can’t have an MRI.
Contributors to this news report include: Cyndy McGrath, Executive Producer; Marsha Lewis, Field Producer; Rusty Reed, Videographer; Roque Correa, Editor.
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Sources:
https://www.fusfoundation.org/diseases-and-conditions/neurological/essential-tremor
MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS
RESEARCH SUMMARY
TOPIC: STOP SHAKING: ELIMINATING ESSENTIAL TREMORS WITHOUT SURGERY
REPORT: MB #4825
BACKGROUND: Essential tremor (ET) is a neurological disorder that causes your hands, head, trunk, voice or legs to shake rhythmically. It sometimes gets confused with Parkinson’s disease, but is the most common nervous system disorder. Everyone has a small degree of tremor, but the movements usually cannot be seen or felt because the tremor is so small. When tremors are noticeable, the condition is then an essential tremor. It is most common among people older than 65 but can affect people at any age. The cause of ET is unknown. However, one theory suggests the cerebellum and other parts of the brain are not communicating correctly. In most people, the condition seems to be passed down from a parent to a child. So, if your parent has ET, there is a 50% chance you or your children will inherit the gene.
(Source: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/essential-tremor-disorder)
SYMPTOMS, SIGNS AND DIAGNOSIS: If you have essential tremors, you will have shaking and trembling at different times and in different situations, but some characteristics are common to all. Some may experience tremors occurring when you move but are less noticeable when you rest; when you take certain medicines, caffeine or are experiencing stress and as you get older. The signs of tremors are most obvious in your hands. You will have difficulty doing tasks such as writing or using tools. You may have a shaking or quivering sound in your voice and uncontrollable head-nodding. Diagnosing tremors happens with a comprehensive neurological examination by an experienced clinician. Your doctor will probably need to rule out other conditions that cause shaking or trembling like hyperthyroidism and alcohol use disorder.
(Source: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/essential-tremor-disorder)
BREAKTHROUGH TREATMENT: A new procedure for treating essential tumor is MR-guided focused ultrasound. It uses high-intensity focused ultrasound energy, guided by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to heat a small, targeted area of tissue in the brain. This procedure can be done while the patient is awake and happens inside an MRI scanner. The scanner measures, very precisely, the increased temperature in the brain caused by the ultrasound energy. This energy causes a small burn in the targeted tissue. Because ultrasound can pass through skin, muscle, fat, and bone without incisions, it is an ideal treatment tool. Ultrasound energy is also non-ionizing, meaning that you are not exposed to potentially dangerous radiation during the procedure.
(Source: https://healthcare.utah.edu/neurosciences/neurosurgery/focused-ultrasound.php)
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS REPORT, PLEASE CONTACT:
SUZANNE WINCHESTER
801.581.3102
SUZANNE.WINCHESTER@HSC.UTAH.EDU
If this story or any other Ivanhoe story has impacted your life or prompted you or someone you know to seek or change treatments, please let us know by contacting Marjorie Bekaert Thomas at mthomas@ivanhoe.com
