Detailed brain transplant gives comfort in the long term of chronic pain

The brain transplant that is discovered when someone is in pain and responds to a deep brain stimulating people to reduce people from previously undesirable chronic pain – as one of the participants was able to embrace his wife for the first time in years.

Chronic pain affects up to 20 percent of people In the United States, many of them suffer from little relief from traditional pain treatments. This may be because it can be caused by the basic changes in the brain circles, which are a challenge to target and reshape them with standard treatments.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS), which includes stimulating the brain with small electrodes, showed a promise but has inconsistent results. Traditionally, the same brain areas are targeted in one approach that suits everyone, despite the evidence that the pain arises from different circles in different people.

So Brasad Sherfalal At the University of California, San Francisco and his colleagues wondered whether a personal system would be more effective. To find out, six people suffering from chronic pain that could not be treated previously, as electrodes recorded electrodes from 14 locations across their brain over 10 days.

For five participants, researchers were able to identify sites targeting and any frequency stimulating the greatest satisfaction. Although one of the five did not report a significant relief of pain, he is an experience in improving the physical function and was able to embrace his wife for the first time in years, which was considered sufficiently meaningful to make him apply to the next stage of the trial.

The researchers then used automatic learning to identify and distinguish between the electrical activity that occurred when individuals suffered from high or low levels of pain. Then they planted permanent DBS poles in each participant, which were allocated to monitor their brain activity and provide optimal stimulation whenever a pain -related activity was discovered, and their activation is detected when they were asleep.

After six months of control, each device was placed in the test in an experiment in which the participants received either their real and personal motivation for a period of three months, followed by a three -month trick, or vice versa, as the participants were not informed in any way of the motivation they were receiving. The Levant motivated the brain at very low in areas outside the ideal location, and pain reviews have been collected several times a day throughout the experiment.

On average, real motivation reduces the intensity of daily pain by 50 percent, compared to 11 percent increase with the cheek. The daily steps increased by 18 percent during real motivation compared to 1 percent during the ministry. Participants also reported less symptoms of depression and expressed less pain that interfere with their daily lives during real motivation. These benefits continued to follow 3.5 years.

“This is an important study that benefits from the latest tools,” he says. Tim Denison At Oxford University.

It represents a previous problem of DBS technology, as the brain adapts to stimulating declines and consistent effectiveness. Denison says that the ongoing benefits may be related to the participants who receive stimulation only when the levels of pain increases, rather than being fixed. He says the next step is to compare adaptive motivation against continuous to measure the differences in the results.

“There is another challenge is the economy and the expansion of this technology,” says Denison.

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