Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been used for movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease and dystonia. More recently, researchers including Darin Dougherty, MD in the Department of Psychiatry and Andreas Horn, MD in the Department of Neurosurgery, have been exploring the use of DBS for treatment-refractory psychiatric disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and major depressive disorder.
In an article in CNN, Dougherty and Horn discuss efforts to finetune and improve the effectiveness of DBS. They discussed the findings of a recent study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, in which Horn, Dougherty and an international team of researchers analyzed data from 534 DBS electrodes implanted in the brains of people receiving DBS for the treatment of four different neuropsychiatric conditions: Parkinson’s disease, dystonia, Tourette’s syndrome and OCD. By analyzing which connections were associated with optimal therapeutic response when stimulated, the researchers were able to identify and map out specific dysfunctional circuits for each of the disorders.
What this means is that, rather than stimulating many different regions of the brain, these maps can allow greater precision in targeting dysfunctional brain circuits.
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Deep brain stimulation didn’t work for a young OCD patient until new brain maps changed everything (CNN)
Hollunder B, Ostrem JL, Sahin IA, Rajamani N, Oxenford S, Butenko K, Neudorfer C, Reinhardt P, Zvarova P, Polosan M, Akram H, Vissani M, Zhang C, Sun B, Navratil P, Reich MM, Volkmann J, Yeh FC, Baldermann JC, Dembek TA, Visser-Vandewalle V, Alho EJL, Franceschini PR, Nanda P, Finke C, Kühn AA, Dougherty DD, Richardson RM, Bergman H, DeLong MR, Mazzoni A, Romito LM, Tyagi H, Zrinzo L, Joyce EM, Chabardes S, Starr PA, Li N, Horn A. Mapping dysfunctional circuits in the frontal cortex using deep brain stimulation. Nat Neurosci. 2024 Mar;27(3):573-586.
