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Summary & Participants

Parkinson's disease affects over 1 million people in the United States, and though there is no cure, there are various treatment options available. One of the latest approaches includes a device therapy called deep brain stimulation.

Medically Reviewed On: July 09, 2008

Webcast Transcript

DAVID MARKS, MD: Hi and welcome to our webcast. I'm Dr. David Marks.

Parkinson's disease affects over a million people in the United States. And though there's no cure, there are a lot of treatment options including drug therapy and surgery. Today we're going to focus on one of the latest approaches to treating Parkinson's disease and it's known as deep brain stimulation.

Here to talk about this cutting-edge therapy is Dr. Michele Tagliati. He's a neurologist at Beth Israel Medical Center. Welcome. And next to him is a neurosurgeon, Dr. Ron Alterman, also from Beth Israel in New York. Welcome. We're lucky enough also to have a patient who's undergone brain surgery and that's Carol Polenberg. Thank you very much for being here. And next to her is Odus Lynd. He's the caregiver of a Parkinson's patient named Richard who had the therapy but who could not be here, but you're going to tell us all about it, right?

ODUS LYND: Right.

DAVID MARKS, MD: So, thanks for being here.

First of all, Dr. Tagliati, tell me about Parkinson's disease. How is it diagnosed and what is it?

MICHELE TAGLIATI, MD: It is a neurodegenerative disease that is caused by the premature death of a small area of the brain that produce a neurochemical that is called dopamine. And the brain use dopamine to send signals to the muscles and make our movement coordinated and appropriate for our function during the day.

DAVID MARKS, MD: So when there's not enough dopamine, what happens? What are the symptoms that make the diagnosis?

MICHELE TAGLIATI, MD: There are three cardinal symptoms of Parkinson disease. One is tremor, that is usually present at rest and not during any particular movement. The second one is an unusual slowness of movement and a lack of coordination and dexterity in your fine movements. And the third one is a stiffness of your muscle that we call rigidity. There is a fourth symptom that usually occur late in the disease that is an abnormality of balance that unfortunately cause frequent falls in the patients.

DAVID MARKS, MD: Now Dr. Alterman, there are a lot of new treatments available now. Tell us about some of these new brain surgery treatments.

RON ALTERMAN, MD: Well, first of all, medical therapy continues to be the front-line therapy for Parkinson's disease and l-dopa continues to be the gold standard of those medical therapies.

We now know, however, that the medical therapies over time will lose their effectiveness and when medicine is no longer adequately controlling the patient's symptoms, then surgery becomes appropriate. And of the surgeries, the best -- or the most effective -- surgery thus far has been deep brain stimulation. And specifically deep brain stimulation at the subthalamic nucleus. And this surgery was approved by the FDA for use in the United States.

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