University professors lauded a federal initiative to fund brain research aims to improve treatment for a variety of neurological and psychiatric conditions that was announced last week.
Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the initiative will allocate more than $70 million over the next five years to improve deep brain stimulation, which involves the surgical implantation of a device that generates electrical impulses in the brain.
DARPA hopes to better understand mechanisms behind neurological and psychiatric diseases and to apply this knowledge to the creation of a new medical device to be implanted in the brain during the deep brain stimulation procedure. The new device will be more specific and sensitive than those currently available and will respond to constant feedback from the patient’s body.
“This field is something we have been talking about at Brown for some time,” said Benjamin Greenberg, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior. “I think DARPA getting involved and making this a priority in research will certainly push the whole field forward.”
Though currently used as treatment for particular brain disorders, many of the potential applications of deep brain stimulation remain unknown.
“We only understand a little bit about how it works, but it has a huge amount of promise for improving the lives of patients,” said Michael Frank, associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences. “We need to understand the mechanisms by which it works,” which will lead to improvement of the technique and more effective application in the medical realm, he said.
About 100,000 people in the world have been treated with deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders, Greenberg said. The procedure is less commonly used to treat psychiatric patients, he added.
Psychiatric conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder are more challenging for clinicians to treat with deep brain stimulation.
“It’s easier to observe the changes in movement than it is to observe the changes in habits and compulsion and obsessions,” Frank said. “We understand the brain circuitry that underlies Parkinson’s better than we understand the brain circuitry that underlies OCD.”
Though it offers potential benefits for patients, deep brain stimulation sometimes has side effects, such as bleeding or infection, Greenberg said, adding that it can also potentially induce seizures after implantation. “The stimulation itself can produce changes in behavior that can be side effects,” he said.
Deep brain stimulation may cause some patients with Parkinson’s to “become impulsive,” Frank said. “They make risky decisions, their personalities can change. They might become gamblers, or they might say things that they wouldn’t normally say.”
A benefit of deep brain stimulation is that it is reversible, and the electrodes can be removed, said Nicole McLaughlin, assistant professor of pscyhiatry and human behavior.
“It is possible that something may be developed within five years,” McLaughlin said. “Whether or not it will function effectively in psychiatric populations has yet to be seen.”
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