Parkinson’s disease can be treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the very advanced stage when patients develop medically refractory fluctuations and dyskinesia. A new publication suggests that the treatment is better than medical treatment already at an earlier stage.

Parkinson’s disease is a slowly progressive neurodegenerative disease which affects mobility until a state when the patients are unable to move without help. This comes with a dramatic loss of quality of life. So far DBS was only used for patients who have severe fluctuations and oscillate between severe akinetic and dyskinetic phases during the day. These patients had disease duration beyond 11 years. Previous controlled studies have shown that quality of life can be significantly improved for this patient group.

(Press release by Günther Deuschl and Yves Agid for the EARLYSTIM-study group)