Bay Area patients among first in U.S. to receive life-changing Parkinson’s treatment

Deb Zeyen, a 77-year-old with Parkinson's disease, experienced improved hand movement and voice volume after a nurse practitioner interacted with a tablet connected to her implanted medical device.

This device delivers adaptive deep-brain stimulation, a recently FDA-approved treatment for Parkinson's. Zeyen and two others at Stanford were among the first in the US to receive this as regular care, moving beyond clinical trials.

The treatment, while not a cure, uses electrical pulses to the brain to counteract the irregular signals caused by neuron loss in Parkinson's, which affects an estimated 1 million Americans. Zeyen reported that the treatment "literally gave me a life back." A Stanford neurologist, Helen Bronte-Stewart, who led the clinical trial, explained the brain activity in Parkinson's as a chaotic "protest march" where normal signals are drowned out.