GAINESVILLE – It’s an early morning in Gainesville for PJ Delaney and his family.
To best explain DBS, UFHealth Neurosurgeon Dr. Kelly D. Foote says the brain is a supercomputer.
“Different wires and circuits in the brain are responsible for things like vision and hearing,” Dr. Foote said.
They’re also responsible for movement. That’s why PJ is here.
“Parkinson’s disease is a disease that makes it so you can’t move the way you want to move,” Dr. Foote said.
Pj’s movement circuit isn’t functioning properly. That’s where DBS comes in.
“We get the DBS lead in just the right spot, where the bad signal is coming from. We deliver rapid pulses of electricity that sort of act like white noise and cover up that bad signal. That allows the rest of the motor network in that circuitry to function better,” Dr. Foote said.
The lead goes in the right side of PJ’s brain, which controls movements in the left side of his body, where he’s had the most trouble.
“Wild, dyskinetic movements, or extra involuntary movements, stimulation really suppresses those nicely; and I think that’s one of the things PJ’s looking forward to,” Dr. Foote said.
In this operation Dr. Foote is putting the wire in the faulty part of PJ’s brain, but it’s not plugged in yet.
“We’ll attach it to the skull, and it’ll be coiled up under his scalp,” Dr. Foote said.
Until his next surgery, where he will connect the wire to a generator, that when activated, delivers signals to relax PJ’s dyskinesia.
“You just turn it up; you turn it down; you adjust it and ultimately, you find the best setting and just leave it there,” Dr. Foote said.
Swelling caused by the surgery helps.
“That swollen part of the brain, that stops functioning for awhile. It’s stunned. Since that’s the part of the brain that’s sending out the bad signal, its actually therapeutic,” Dr. Foote said.
First PJ has to get through the surgery awake.
“If you’re awake you can participate, and I think we can maybe get a little bit better outcome,” Dr. Foote tells PJ during the surgery.
Then they turned on the system. UFHealth Neurologist Dr. Leonardo Almeida takes it from here.
“We do a little bit of fine tuning before deciding where to implant the electrode in a final position,” Dr. Almeida said.
That tells them where the lead should be.
“One millimeter in the brain is the difference between Florida and California,” Dr. Almeida said.
The team at UFHealth has implanted more than 1,800 DBS leads, and Dr. Foote says it never gets old.
“There are only a couple places in the hospital where people are happy:” Dr. Foote said, “where they’re delivering babies and in my O.R. Everybody else is sick, but those people are coming out of this with a substantial improvement, and that’s really fun.”
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