Five people who had life-altering, seemingly irreversible cognitive deficits following moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries showed substantial improvements in their cognition and quality of life after receiving an experimental form of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in a phase 1 clinical trial.
The trial, reported Dec. 4 in Nature Medicine, was led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine, Stanford University, the Cleveland Clinic, Harvard Medical School and the University of Utah.
The findings pave the way for larger clinical trials of the DBS technique and offer hope that cognitive deficits associated with disability following traumatic brain injury (TBI) may be treatable, even many years after the injury.
The DBS stimulation, administered for 12 hours a day, targeted a brain region called the thalamus. After three months of treatment, all the participants scored higher on a standard test of executive function that involves mental control, with the improvements ranging from 15% to 55%.
The participants also markedly improved on secondary measures of attention and other executive functions. Several of the participants and their family members reported substantial quality of life gains, including improvements in the ability to work and to participate in social activities, according to a report describing participant and family perspectives from the trial. Dr. Joseph Fins, the E. William Davis, Jr., MD Professor of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medicine, led that research effort.
CLICK HERE to read more.
|