Neurosurgeon pioneers Alzheimer's, addiction treatments using ultrasound [video]
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he was even able to go back to his woodworking hobby, that he thought he'd never be able to do again.
they did multiple MRI's to make sure they could hit the exact location, and they appear to have done so.
Super excited for any breakthroughs with Dementia … but fixing addiction, obesity… or even paranoid wrong think with ultrasounds is scary and perhaps harks back to the era of lobotomies.
Harkening back to lobotomies is a false dichotomy, the environment in which research is done today wouldn't even allow for an outcome like that.
They are literally shaking small parts of the brain until they act differently. It's not as extreme as a lobotomy but its lobotomy adjacent and a little scary.
Sure, unlike a lobotomy it probably just jostling areas of the brain and not damaging entire sections with an icepick, but it's still fair to accept that some people (like myself) feel automatic body horror and fear at the idea of parts of my brain being damaged.
If I were in that position I might seriously consider the value of having 99% of me make it to the other side of this misery in exchange for the 1% of my brain that is ruining my life.
In fact the second treatment is also standard issue for all those who are diagnosed with oppositionism, a growing mental health disorder characterized by symptoms such as distrusting government authorities and forbes 500 companies. Treatments show a 90% reduction of symptoms and improving quality of life, for example they no longer clash with authorities or make hate statements as defined by the patriot act II of 2028.
Obviously an exaggeration, but there is a real concern. The line is blurry and will be crossed if we let it happen. Taking intravenous drugs for 20 years does some serious damage. It's nice if we develop a treatment for it, but it also shifts the focus away from prevention. People shouldn't be reaching that point, and wouldn't if we were acting on it.
Panicking about new treatments because "they" might someday bundle them with other treatments isn't particularly effective, because you can just decline the treatments you don't want. The days of no-oversight asshole doctors drilling holes in people for being weird are conscripted to the past. If patient rights to refuse treatment are destroyed, then sure, freak out all you want.
Meanwhile, research is not a zero-sum game. Treatments and prevention can be, and are, worked on in parallel, often by people with wildly different research backgrounds. Specifically, the resources and personnel involved are not fungible. Discouraging field A because you'd rather have someone work on field B doesn't necessarily mean anyone will work on field B, it just guarantees you don't make progress in field A.
With regards to the body horror thing, that is legitimate and there is the possibility that we look back on this in 20 years like we do with lobotomy. I personally think it's unlikely considering the differences in how research is regulated compared to the past.
In general I think we need to reframe how we look at medical treatments. Changing the brain is literally the point - it's dysfunctional. Whether that be through physical manipulation like this or via pharmacology, something HAS to change functionally or there will be no difference. Until the point that we have nano robots carrying out bodily processes for us it's on our brain and body to adapt to whatever environmental stress it's exposed to, for better (exercising improving health for example) and for worse(trauma causing increased likelihood of addiction etc). This treatment is no different from anything else, all that matters is the positive or negative reaction.
No, from what other comments have said, they are using ultrasound to open the blood/brain barrier so that drugs can enter the affected area. They aren't indiscriminately shaking the patient's brain and hoping for the best.
Following their original thread, how would you feel if the government decided that this could be used for criminal correction, or if a company made going through a quick brain cleanse a part of the hiring process, or a college part of it's onboarding, or the military a part of boot camp?
Do we clean every spot to flawless similarity or just clean the bad thoughts?
If the latter, who gets to decide what the bad thoughts are?
I don't know if you've ever known any addicts, but they aren't exactly happy about being addicted. Give them a treatment that works and is affordable and most of them will be just happy to get some targeted head buzzing to treat their symptoms.
As I've said in other responses, my viewpoint is coming from the viewpoint of a generally healthy mind and not wanting that to be taken from me.
If I become someone with an unhealthy mind my viewpoint could change.
I've been drunk plenty of times. I've also not consumed enough alcohol to be in a drunken state in almost 8 years despite having a collection of bourbon worth thousands. A good friend of mine, who drank no more than I did for a long while, could not stop. He kept going until he wrecked his liver and died from organ failure.
I didn't have the strength to overcome alcoholism. I was simply never an alcoholic. He was.
Chocolate on the other hand…
If not, I suggest we leave it up to the patients and their doctors to determine whether or not ECT is improving their lives, or not.
Not available to everyone yet.
Electroshock therapy for behavioral modification in schools: bad
Modern Electroconvulsive therapy under anesthesia: actually effective and arguably lifesaving for severe clinical depression.
Is that just violent punishment / torture by another name?
It was falsely maligned in the "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", because it can _look_ upsetting. However, even when it was done without anesthesia, it caused amnesia so patients didn't remember the procedure itself.
That's also how dissociative sedation works. You don't remember being sedated, and you are not (psychologically) traumatized by medical procedures happening during it. I had it several times for minor oral surgeries, and it's great.
And the modern ECT is also done under deep sedation.
I don't think the human memory is well understood enough to say for sure whether consciously forgetting something means that there aren't still effects of your body having experienced the trauma in the first place. The mind, it would seem, goes deeper than conscious recollection, and perhaps beyond the brain.
Plenty of children abused before they can remember it still have exhibited signs of harm from the trauma.
Sometimes it helps, if the hammer is hitting just the right place. Often it does nothing, letting the underlying disease to progress. And in distressingly many cases, it can harm patients.
This absolutely applies to the ECT.
The BBB is essential for the brain from cytokines. An imbalance of immune system function inside the brain can cause havoc long term.
I read regarding the BLB (barrier for the Cochlear). A compromised BLB is thought to be the cause for many hearing ailments such as Tinnitus and hearing loss. An experiment was done where blood was injected directly into the cochlear fluids and this resulted in extreme hearing loss in mice.
A drug delivery method in a controlled fashion is what has been needed yesterday.
- we can map the brain structure using fMRI
- we can change the structure (or parts of it) using ultrasound
- we can (or soon will be) able to read thought patterns via LLMs analyzing brain waves
To me, that sounds like we are not far off from being able to take an iterative approach to live brain modification.
Both scary and fascinating at the same time.
source ?
who says that the brain waves we can measure hold information like that in a useful level of granularity ?
you can have something that distinguishes "angry" from "happy" etc, sure, but thought patterns ?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546708v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.11.499562v3
LFP - "macro recordings" from larger electrical contacts like EEG, DBS leads, ECoG, i.e. waves from large areas of the brain
single unit - smaller electrodes thought to capture recordings from 1 or a few neurons. There's actually a ton of stuff looking at differential responses of single unit brain waves against a lot of different psychological stimuli.
NEURIPS had a couple of presentations on LLMs interpreting stuff from fMRI - maybe not "brain waves" technically speaking but it may be approaching "thought patterns".
The LLM thing sounds a bit off though. I think whatever article you read on this may have misinterpreted it.
fMRI has poor spatial (about 1mm) and temporal (about 1s) resolution.
Maybe it is because it would be a dream to see into the brain that the mainstream media keeps bringing this stuff up?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00222...
However, that doesn't mean removing the plaques will replace cognitive abilities.
If you think of neurons like plumbing, the plaques clog up the tubes, and the neural connections are no longer firing. Removing the plaques doesn't mean a whole doesn't exist in the tube, it just means you've unclogged it, meaning the contents can now spill out.
This isn't to say that amyloid plaques are the only marker in age related cognitive decline.
My suspicion (and I do some work in the field) is that many different diseases are being lumped into a single thing that we don't completely understand. There is a lot more which will be learned in the next decade.
There was a research scandal a while back that called into question some amount of data. And there’s the fact that many attempts at attacking the plaques have not been able to show any significant improvement to patients.
You're also mostly correct that attacking the plaques have not shown significant improvement.
But that only shows that the damage done to the brain is irreversible - if in fact the plaques are the cause/related. It does not show that preventing the plaques/damage is the key.
UEF’s new JPND projects explore focused ultrasound and multimodal interventions to fight dementia https://www.uef.fi/en/article/uefs-new-jpnd-projects-explore...
>Focused ultrasound (FUS) is a non-invasive, ground-breaking brain stimulation technique suggested for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. FUS promotes transient opening of the blood-brain barrier and enhances the microglial-mediated clearance of beta-amyloid typically accumulating in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying these beneficial effects are poorly known, which limits the full translation of FUS into the therapeutic arena.
>The REBALANCE project coordinated by Professor Tarja Malm at the A. I. Virtanen Institute for Molecular Sciences aims to discover the key cellular targets and molecular mechanisms underlying FUS-induced brain cleaning and therapeutic efficacy in Alzheimer’s disease. The project partners have previously demonstrated therapeutic efficacy for FUS stimulation alone and combined with microbubbles.
>We hypothesise that FUS, through the activation of mechanosensitive Piezo1 channels, enhances beta-amyloid clearance by microglial cells and facilitates the removal of waste from the brain into the blood stream. This occurs through the improvement of glymphatic flow together with transient increase in the blood-brain barrier permeability. Moreover, increased blood-brain barrier permeability enables drug delivery into the brain, further boosting beta-amyloid clearance,”
For the Alzheimers treatments, it seems the damage (if it can be called that?) is subtle enough that it only lasts 24-48 hours, and shouldn't have side effects if that is true (the drugs themselves will of course have side effects). For other treatments, it is essentially pinpoint surgery, so has all the same risks, but less so because pinpoint. I can certainly imagine that destroying a few neurons to treat essential tremor could have drastic side effects.
i suspect a nightclub that plays music which opens the blood-brain barrier would lead to some peculiar outcomes