Chip in brain heals obsession

Portland – Amber Pearson, 34, used to wash her hands until they bled. She was terrified of contamination from daily items, a debilitating result of her obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

But the repetitive rituals are largely consigned to memory, thanks to a revolutionary brain implant that is being used to treat her epilepsy and her OCD.

“I’m actually present in my daily life and that’s incredible,” she said.

“Before, I was just... worrying about my compulsions,” she said.

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 in the brain is not new. 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 32mm-long device to treat her debilitating epileptic seizures, confident it would detect the activity that causes the episodes and deliver a pulse to interfere with them.

It was then that Pearson had something of a lightbulb moment.

Ahmed Raslan, who performed the procedure at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, said: “It was her idea to say: ‘Well, you’re going into my brain and putting in this wire and I have OCD, so can you just put a wire for OCD?’.

“And luckily, we took that suggestion seriously.”

There had previously been some study of the use of deep-brain stimulation for people suffering from OCD, but, said Raslan, it had never been combined with treatment for epilepsy.

The dual-programme device now watches for brain activity associated with epilepsy and with OCD.

It is “the only device in the world that treats two conditions”, says Raslan.

“And it’s programmed independently. So the programme for epilepsy is different than the programme for OCD.” –