This article focuses on Tourette’s Syndrome (a neuropsychiatric disorder that affects roughly 1% of the population) and the relationship between increased gamma band activity in the thalamus promoted by deep brain stimulation and inhibition or minimization of tics and/or other symptoms of Tourette’s in both short-term and long-term evaluations. To clarify, tics are involuntary physical or verbal reactions that begin during early childhood and are characteristic of Tourette’s Syndrome. This research consisted of five patients who received Neurospace™ neurostimulator implants in the centromedian nucleus of the thalamus allowing researchers to receive local field potential readings from that area over a period of six months with follow-ups every
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Five of those nine patients met both DSM-IV-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-fourth edition-text revision) and TS DBS (Tourette’s Syndrome Deep Brain Stimulation) criteria. The five patients consisted of two men and three women aging 28-39 who had suffered from Tourette’s for 20-37 years and presenting with severe physical and verbal tics and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) symptoms. According to this article, researchers used both Yale Global Tic Severity and Modified Rush Tic Rating Scales to assess the severity of the patients’ tics. Equally important, all of the patients’ symptoms resisted traditional medications. In addition to meeting the criteria for the study, two panels (one interdisciplinary expert and one independent ethics) approved the patients for deep brain stimulation surgery. Of course, patients signed informed consent forms so that they could participate in the study and researchers also received approval from the Institutional Review Board at University of Florida for the procedures used in the …show more content…
While, according to this study, there is an apparent link between the improvement of patients’ symptoms and increased gamma band activity, the study only researched 5 patients’ results from deep brain stimulation. Surprisingly, the authors did not illustrate the long-term results of all of the patients, which presents doubt that long-term results are as similar to the short-term results as the article briefly states. Despite the fact that I do not think the research is a complete success and have some questions about the presented research results, I feel that this process could be a good platform for other studies and that deep brain stimulation for Tourette’s patients is worth researching. Additional studies should include larger numbers of patients in order to determine the significance of increased gamma band activity in relation to the severity of Tourette’s symptoms and viability of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for Tourette’s
Five of those nine patients met both DSM-IV-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-fourth edition-text revision) and TS DBS (Tourette’s Syndrome Deep Brain Stimulation) criteria. The five patients consisted of two men and three women aging 28-39 who had suffered from Tourette’s for 20-37 years and presenting with severe physical and verbal tics and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) symptoms. According to this article, researchers used both Yale Global Tic Severity and Modified Rush Tic Rating Scales to assess the severity of the patients’ tics. Equally important, all of the patients’ symptoms resisted traditional medications. In addition to meeting the criteria for the study, two panels (one interdisciplinary expert and one independent ethics) approved the patients for deep brain stimulation surgery. Of course, patients signed informed consent forms so that they could participate in the study and researchers also received approval from the Institutional Review Board at University of Florida for the procedures used in the …show more content…
While, according to this study, there is an apparent link between the improvement of patients’ symptoms and increased gamma band activity, the study only researched 5 patients’ results from deep brain stimulation. Surprisingly, the authors did not illustrate the long-term results of all of the patients, which presents doubt that long-term results are as similar to the short-term results as the article briefly states. Despite the fact that I do not think the research is a complete success and have some questions about the presented research results, I feel that this process could be a good platform for other studies and that deep brain stimulation for Tourette’s patients is worth researching. Additional studies should include larger numbers of patients in order to determine the significance of increased gamma band activity in relation to the severity of Tourette’s symptoms and viability of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for Tourette’s