nexNeuro

RALEIGH, N.C.

Stimulating the spinal column with electrical pulses shows early promise in easing much of the stiffness and shaking of Parkinson’s disease, scientists at Duke University reported recently.

The findings, featured as the cover story in the journal Science, resulted from studies on laboratory mice and rats. The approach will now be tested on primates and could move to humans within a year, researchers said.“This has a chance to evolve very quickly,” said Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke and senior study investigator. He said the spinal-column therapy could use technology that is already available for treating chronic pain.

But patients and advocates urged caution, noting that the research has a long way to go before it proves beneficial in humans.

“I think it’s interesting, but how it relates to the real human condition is another question,” said Dr. Michael S. Okun, a neurologist and medical director for the National Parkinson Foundation.

Parkinson’s disease, which afflicts 1.5 million Americans, occurs when nerve cells in the brain quit producing a chemical called dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is essential for the body to move smoothly. People with Parkinson’s typically have tremors, walk stiffly, become forgetful and addled, and suffer depression.

The Duke team approached the disease from the standpoint that dopamine deficiency causes the electrical currents from the brain to go haywire, pulsing all at once. The Duke team reasoned that electrical stimulations along the spinal cord might reset that faulty brain-body signal.

It’s not an entirely new idea. A current strategy for Parkinson’s patients uses a similar tactic, but it directly targets the brain for the electrical signal. As a result, deep brain stimulation requires an invasive brain surgery and is recommended only as a last resort for a small portion of Parkinson’s patients.

Stimulating the spinal column can be done without any surgery and has been used to treat patients with chronic pain. But it wasn’t clear that the approach was viable for a neurological disease such as Parkinson’s.

“It’s a big deal that we found it to work,” Nicolelis said.

Using mice deprived of dopamine, the Duke researchers attached an electrical stimulator on a section of spinal column in mice that ferries sensory information from the body to the brain.

Within seconds of pulsing a signal on the stimulator, mice that had been stiff and shaky began walking and grooming like normal animals.

The approach also cut the amount of medicine the mice needed to gain mobility. That finding was especially heartening to the researchers, because drug therapies for Parkinson’s patients often lose their effectiveness.

If spinal stimulation works similarly with humans, Nicolelis said, it could extend the period of time that current medicines work.