HOW IS YOUR MEMORY/

As Reported in Futurist Magazine

Brain Pacemakers To Stop Memory Loss?

Can a cybernetic brain implant help the elderly keep their memories? In December, a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University implanted a pacemaker-like device in a patient in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The device sends electrical pulses to areas inside the brain, a treatment that’s referred to as deep brain stimulation.

Deep brain stimulation has proven effective in treating types of Parkinson’s disease, as well as severe depression. Early results from a previous Toronto study suggest that the technique could be useful in slowing or even reversing the effects of Alzheimer’s, as well. Early-stage sufferers who received the device saw an increase in their levels of glucose metabolism over the course of 13 months--a positive sign, since glucose metabolism is a good indicator of increased neuronal activity. Without such stimulation, most Alzheimer’s patients show decreased glucose metabolism in that time.

The United States spends more than $172 billion a year treating the more than 5.3 million Americans who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Within the next 40 years, the number of people diagnosed with the disease is expected to triple as the U.S. baby-boomer population ages. Despite decades of expensive research, scientists have never discovered a drug to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

"This is a very different approach, whereby we are trying to enhance the function of the brain mechanically. It's a whole new avenue for potential treatment for a disease becoming all the more common with the aging of the population,"  said Johns Hopkins researcher Paul B. Rosenberg.
Some 40 people are expected to receive the implant in 2013 at Johns Hopkins and four other institutions in the United States and Canada.  Source: Johns Hopkins University.
 

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However, Brain Pacemakers are also being studied in other places of the world as well, like Germany at the University of Bonn.

In 2009, the Bonn scientists were able to establish that brain pacemakers also demonstrate an effect in the most severely depressed patients. Ten subjects who underwent implantation of electrodes in the nucleus accumbens all experienced relief of symptoms. Half of the subjects had a particularly noticeable response to the stimulation by the electrodes.

“In the current study, we investigated whether these effects last over the long term or whether the effects of the deep brain stimulation gradually weaken in patients,” says Prof. Schläpfer. There are always relapses in the case of psychotherapy or drug treatment. Many patients had already undergone up to 60 treatments with psychotherapy, medications and electroconvulsive therapy, to no avail. “By contrast, in the case of deep brain stimulation, the clinical improvement continues steadily for many years.”

The scientists observed a total of eleven patients over a period of two to five years. “Those who initially responded to the deep brain stimulation are still responding to it even today,” says the Bonn psychiatrist, summarizing the results. During the study, one patient committed suicide. “That is very unfortunate,” says Prof. Schläpfer.

“However, this cannot always be prevented in the case of patients with very severe depression.“

And, like everything else in the world of data, extremes (or outliers) only serve the prove the rule; yet, this is still encouraging.