Khosro Hekmat
Can a pacemaker in my brain quieten my legs? Two hair-fine electrodes are pushed through the skull into a nucleus of the diencephalon a few millimetres across and connected to a pulse generator below the collarbone. In Parkinson’s disease and in tremor this is an established and effective procedure. Anyone who cannot keep still at night rightly asks whether it might work for them too. This volume says what sixty-nine described people really yield - and why not one of them was operated on because of the restless legs. It shows why a few millimetres decide the direction of the effect, and how the same stimulation can also cause the complaints. It also puts the question that concerns the whole field: why, in all these studies, did nobody measure the legs but only ask about them? And what does it actually mean to be regarded as impossible to control with medication? WHAT IS IN THE BOOK- What a brain pacemaker is and how it is implanted- What risks an operation on the brain carries- Why the thalamus appears in almost every study of this condition- Whether the people operated on have the same illness- What happened in twenty-two people with Parkinson’s and thirteen with tremor- Whether a brain pacemaker can also trigger restless legs- Whether the improvement comes only from reducing tablets afterwards- What applies when brain surgery is planned anyway and restless legs come with it WHO THIS BOOK IS FORFor people with Parkinson’s disease or tremor facing deep brain stimulation who also have restless legs, for patients to whom the procedure has been suggested, and for everyone who wants to know where the limit of established knowledge runs. ABOUT THE SERIESVolume 47 of 52 in the book series on restless legs syndrome, part 'Device-Based Treatments and Research'. Every volume can be read on its own. The statements in this volume rest on 203 professional sources, each one listed individually in the reference section.
