An article at GlobalTV caught my eye:
Five years ago an overweight 50-year-old man lay in a Toronto operating room while surgeons made small holes in his skull just behind his hairline.
Through these holes electrodes were implanted in the man’s hypothalamus in the world’s first human experiment to treat obesity with deep brain stimulation.
In the end, the brain surgery didn’t stop the 190-kg man from overeating. But in a completely unexpected finding, his scores on learning and memory tests shot up from the average range to the superior.
And it now points to a surprising new area of research - a possible way to boost degenerating memory circuits in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.
Given just how tragic Alzheimer’s can be, I know there are a lot of folks who might be interested in such a treatment.
However, the article really caught my eye because it sounded, at first blush, extremely similar to the treatment my wife is undergoing for her severe TBI-induced fibromyalgia.
While my wife’s occipital nerve stimulator hasn’t provided the level of pain relief we would have liked, the turnaround in her cognitive abilities has been remarkable, going from being unable to carry a conversation from any length of time, or having iffy memory, to being nearly back to where it was pre-accident.
It’s amazing what being turned into a cyborg can do.
1 response so far ↓
1 Roberto De Leon-Gonzalez // 31 Jan 2008 at 3:02 pm
Dear Mike,
I ran across that piece of news, first in Yahoo!, then in ABC.com, finally in Youtube (shame on the first two, only Youtube provided good quality video with my computer connection). It blew me away - my mother has Alzheimer’s disease, and I, too, can attest to its frightening effects. This avenue of research must be pursued to its fullest degree, as it promises the first ray of real hope in a long time to AD patients and their family.