Today, about 100,000 people around the world carry nerve electronics implanted in the brain, but have you ever thought about what these devices can do in addition to treating diseases?
a nurse and a patient
This was a late night in 2007. In a hospital in Manhattan, New York, nurse Rebecca Serdans was on duty. But she slowly noticed something was wrong - she felt a growing sense of burning behind her head.
Rebecca has long suffered from a neurological disorder called dystonia, which often causes her to feel weak muscle pain and mobility disorders. And her deep brain stimulation can help her suppress the disease. Like a pacemaker for the brain, the implant device outputs regular electrical impulses to the globus pallidus, an important component of the basal nucleus deep in the hemisphere on both sides of the brain, allowing her to move freely and free from pain.
But now, many years after the surgery, she feels that the implanted device has failed from time to time.
Shortly after the surgery was completed, she received a manual on preventing interference from equipment, such as avoiding strong magnetic fields and microwave ovens, and even some patients need to avoid batteries on electric vehicles.
But there was no microwave oven in the vicinity, no car; she felt that her muscles began to numb as the pain became stronger and stronger.
She didn't know that the place where she stood was a protective ward across a wall—the magnetic field generated by the MRI was enough to make her implanted device 10 meters away.
After enduring the pain and ending the night shift, the doctor helped her reset the device - those symptoms slowly disappeared. She returned to work, and the doctor told her to avoid the equipment in the intensive care unit. But within two months of this, her pacemaker went on strike three times. On the fourth lapse, she slammed back home and fainted in front of her.
After spending nearly 20 years as a nurse, the hospital has in turn threatened her life. There are too many magnetic fields and interference devices distributed here. Her boss doesn't understand what the MRI machine is, and why his nurse suddenly can't work in the intensive care unit.
Implanted device and brain operation
At present, about 100,000 people need to carry brain implant devices like Rebecca; the vast majority of them are used for the treatment of Parkinson's disease. The device itself is connected to the battery by a number of implanted subcutaneous lines; doctors can suppress the tremor of Parkinson's patients by delivering pulses to the central control of the brain. Other dyskinesias such as Rebecca's symptoms are similar treatments.
The human brain is so complex that the surgeons can only distinguish between different functional centers by pulse stimulation tests on different parts - for example, stimulating this will cause your left limb to paralyze, while the other will cause aphasia. In this way, surgeons are also gradually drawing navigation maps that work in the brain.
Dr. Kaplitt was a surgeon who performed surgery for Rebecca that year. He compared the work of the brain to a series of collaborative circuits. A disease like dystonia is like a circuit module that fails, and when you implant a brain stimulation device, it "masks abnormal information between the brain's corresponding modules, or corrects abnormal information."
But Kaplitt also said that these are theoretical assumptions: "The mechanism of brain stimulation is still very ambiguous and controversial."
These mysteries have not slowed down the pace of research in this area. Now patents related to brain stimulation have been able to improve memory, cure stuttering and arouse orgasm. Experimental studies have used such devices to treat Alzheimer's (Alzheimer's) and drug addiction. At present, our implanted devices for these areas of the brain are far from technically in the field of dyskinesia, but we have reason to believe that there are similar rules.
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