US patient ‘happy again’ after brain implant treats OCD
PORTLAND (AFP) – American Amber Pearson used to wash her hands until they bled, terrified by the idea of contamination from everyday items, a debilitating result of her obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
But the repetitive rituals of her condition are largely consigned to memory, thanks to a revolutionary brain implant that is being used to treat both her epilepsy and her OCD.
“I’m actually present in my daily life and that’s incredible,” the 34-year-old told AFP.
“Before, I was just constantly in my head worrying about my compulsions.”
Brain implants have hit the headlines recently with Elon Musk’s announcement that his Neuralink company had placed a chip in a patient’s head, which scientists hope will ultimately allow people to control a smartphone just by thinking about it.
But the idea of inserting a device into the brain is not new, and for decades doctors have known that precisely applied electrical stimulation can affect the way the brain operates.
Such deep-brain stimulation is used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and other conditions affecting movement, including epilepsy.
Pearson’s doctors offered her the 32-millimeter (just over an inch-long) device to treat her debilitating epileptic seizures, confident it would be able to detect the activity that causes the episodes and deliver a pulse to interfere with them.
It was then that Pearson herself had something of a lightbulb moment.
“It was her idea to say: ‘Well, you’re going into my brain and putting this wire, and I have OCD, so can you just put a wire for OCD?,’ ” recalls neurosurgeon Ahmed Raslan, who carried out the procedure at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland on the US West Coast.