March 24, 2023

Patients with Parkinson’s disease achieved a significant improvement in their tremors, mobility, and other physical symptoms after having a minimally invasive procedure involving focused ultrasound, according to a study published Feb. 23 in The New England Journal of Medicine. Nearly 70 percent of patients in the treatment group were considered successful responders to treatment after three months of follow-up, compared to 32 percent in the control group who had an inactive procedure without focused ultrasound. Focused ultrasound is an incisionless procedure, performed without the need for anesthesia or an in-patient hospital stay. Patients, who remain fully alert, lie in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, wearing a transducer helmet. Ultrasonic energy is targeted through the skull to the globus pallidus, a structure deep in the brain that helps control regular voluntary movement. “These results are very promising and offer Parkinson’s disease patients a new form of therapy to manage their symptoms,” said study corresponding author Howard Eisenberg, MD, the Raymond K. Thompson Professor of Neurosurgery at UMSOM and a neurosurgeon at UMMC.

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Depicted: MRI images provide doctors with a real-time temperature map of the area being treated to precisely pinpoint the target and to apply a high enough temperature to ablate it.