Saturday, March 28, 2009

TMS possibilities for Parkinson's Disease ?



MIT Technology Review published an article that goes into some research being done at Duke University which could be translated into a possible use for TMS.
Using a spinal cord stimulator on mice that have the rodent equivalent of Parkinson's the researchers were able to control the symptoms as well, or better than, Deep Brain Stimulation.
This makes me wonder if using a TMS coil over the spinal cord could achieve a similar effect for patients with Parkinson's?
Here is the abstract that was published in Science.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Gone for a While, Now I am Back!

Things have been a bit slow on the Neuromod Blog due to life inserting itself between me and my passion, neuromodulation. New job (non-operative back and neck pain specialist for a large medical group), a move and a board exam later, and I am back.
New posts to follow. Stay tuned, this is an exciting time in neuromodulation. New discoveries and new studies are being published all the time, the pace of our understanding is increasing.
I was speaking with two colleagues the other day, one is a neurosurgeon and the other a plastic surgeon. We started to talk about the potential clinical/therapeutic benefits of neuromodulation and the best analogy I could think of was to equate our understanding of the brain and the possibilities for neuromod as something akin to opening a door to a dark room and realizing the room is big, but you are not sure how big. You yell to see how close the back wall is and all you really can tell is that the room is in fact something like a stadium.