Media release

From: Springer Nature

1.  Neuroscience: Deep brain stimulation may restore some cognitive function in patients with chronic brain injury

Deep brain stimulation of key brain circuits in the thalamus may improve cognitive function in people with long-term cognitive deficits due to traumatic brain injury, a paper published in Nature Medicine suggests. The findings, based on data from a small clinical trial, show that the treatment is also feasible and safe.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) causes enduring physical, cognitive, emotional and behavioral impairments and often leads to persistent cognitive dysfunction that prevents people from returning to prior levels of functioning within their communities. Currently, there are no effective therapies to alleviate the disabling effects of injury-related impairments in attention, executive function, working memory or information-processing speed. Previous research has suggested that a loss of activity in key brain circuits in the thalamus may be associated with a loss of cognitive function.

In a small clinical trial, Nicholas Schiff and colleagues evaluated if deep brain stimulation was feasible and safe and could restore cognitive function in people with chronic TBI-related disability. The authors recruited six adults with a history of moderate to severe TBI resulting in persistent neuropsychological impairment and functional disability. The participants (four men and two women) were between 22 and 60 years of age and were between 3 to 18 years after injury; one participant was later withdrawn from the trial for protocol non-compliance. The authors surgically implanted electrodes into specific areas of the thalamus using novel neuroimaging techniques that predicted neuronal circuits with impaired activation. In the remaining five participants, deep brain stimulation was applied to these circuits in the thalamus without any serious adverse reactions and resulted in improved processing speeds of between 15% to 52% from baseline, measured using a pre-specified cognitive test that measured attention, speed and mental flexibility, spatial organization, visual pursuits, recall, and recognition, before the surgery.

The authors suggest that their findings provide preliminary evidence that deep brain stimulation may improve cognitive function in people with chronic cognitive disability. However, they note that further studies in larger clinical trials are needed to validate the efficacy of this treatment.