Swimmers Beware of Deep Brain Stimulation | Hacker News Reader

Swimmers Beware of Deep Brain Stimulation

nytimes.com

This is astonishing, to say the least.

I'm an excellent swimmer and very athletic. Have been all my life. The idea that an device designed to improve neurological functioning would remove an ability to coordinate one's limbs is stunning.

I'm curious if this would affect other types of coordinated activities. The article doesn't mention running or walking, but what about ice-skating, soccer, or basketball.

EDIT: Article does mention

> How the devices could interfere with swimming is not known. Dr. Baumann and his colleagues suggested that in some patients the signals may somehow affect a brain region that is crucial for coordinating limb movement. He said other complicated, learned skills might also be affected: Some patients said they could no longer ski after receiving stimulators, and one said he could not play golf anymore.

Deep-brain stimulation works by shoving electrodes into your brain and moving them around while asking, "do you feel better now?" (Or having the patient perform a task like writing which demonstrates symptoms of the condition being treated).

The human brain is not exactly well-understood. Who knows what other functionality could end up being near the neurons being treated? This article talks about Parkinson's patients, so maybe the common places that they treat for that disease are close to nerve centers used for balance or proprioception or whatever.

Or maybe some things that we learn only apply when certain areas of the brain are working in a certain way, and "fixing" malfunctions ends up throwing a wrench in the neural pathways that those behaviors have adapted to. It'd be fascinating to see if the patients could re-learn these skills with the stimulators on.

> Deep-brain stimulation works by shoving electrodes into your brain and moving them around while asking, "do you feel better now?" (Or having the patient perform a task like writing which demonstrates symptoms of the condition being treated).

That's somewhat similar to how I've heard(perhaps apocryphally) lobotomies were done. They'd have the patient read from a book or sing a song and would cut until their diction was impacted.

This is not how DBS is done.

The patient is conscious (and possibly performing some task) during the procedure of inserting the electrodes to ensure that they're not positioned in a way that damages any critical functionality.

The 'do you feel better now?' part comes when the signal generator hooked up to those electrodes is being tuned post-op.

The article makes clear that it's the generated signal (maybe in combination with electrode placement, they're unsure) that's interfering with the ability to swim. Turning off the generator allows the individual to swim again.

More fine-grained implants like neuralink can't come soon enough.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191128202757/https://www.nytim...

A better title would be “DBS Patients beware of swimming”, but of course that audience would be much smaller.

It's the 'wet streets cause rain' phenomenon that is ever present in news articles.

I think just replacing "swimmers" with "everyone" is more apt. There's just too many unknowns when it comes to zapping your noggin.

I think it's important to distinguish that DBS as a technique is used for a lot of different neural conditions, with varying degrees of supporting evidence.

As an example DBS for severe cases of epilepsy is actually extremely targeted to specific brain areas and resolves seizures for patients who often have really high morbility.

To taint DBS completely as an intervention because of a side effect when treating Parkinson's seems knee jerking. Realistically there is still a lot about Parkinson pathophysiology that is still being discovered.

I don’t know if I’d say the article is trying to ‘taint’ it. According to the article, even the nine patients who had their swimming ability affected all “preferred to keep their stimulators on, because they provided so much relief from symptoms”. So it’s definitely an effective intervention in this case, just one with a side effect to watch out for. A side effect which is also unusual enough that it makes for an interesting news story.

Edit: I guess you might have gotten that impression from the headline, which is a little clickbaity.

http://archive.ph/hwjD4

Full brain electrical stimulation is an obviously barbaric primitive idea that certain medical community members very vocally defend and assert the merits of. Extremely targeted and sophisticated application of electrical currents might have a legitimate role outside of quack science in the distant future, but the technology isn't there yet.

I thought it has been demonstrated to have excellent outcomes with respect to Parkinson's, is that not the case?

it can have a lot of nasty side effects

Ugh, paywall.

Try disabling JavaScript :)

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