With the push of a button, Dr. Mark Burnett switches off the deep brain stimulation system in his patient Jairo Molina. The tremors from Parkinson's disease quickly return. They go up from Molina's fingers until, within seconds, his whole body is moving. Then Burnett turns the system back on and Molina's tremors start to ease until they are almost gone.
Burnett, a neurosurgeon at NeuroTexas, placed the system into Molina last month at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center Lakeway and started seeing results 48 hours later. He placed two leads into the Parkinson's-affected place deep in Molina's brain. The leads are at the tip of wires that travel underneath the skin down behind the ear, down the side of his neck to a computer mouse-size stimulator under the skin in his chest. The stimulator sends electronic pulses through those wires to the leads in the brain to control the tremors.
While similar systems have been around since the early 2000s, Burnett says, the difference with what Molina has and what other patients have received is the way the systems get there. Molina was the first patient in Texas to have the stimulator inserted in one surgery while asleep using a robot. A second patient has since had the surgery, with a third in the works, Burnett says.
