The future role of using deep brain stimulation: The things that pass through the minds of two high school students

Abstract

Objective: Parkinson's disease is a brain condition that results in unintentional or uncontrollable movements like trembling, stiffness, and issues with balance and coordination. Typically, symptoms start mildly and get worse over time. People could experience difficulties speaking and walking as the illness worsens. The most often performed surgical treatment for Parkinson's is deep brain stimulation (DBS). DBS is not for everyone while being transformational for some. Our study aims to analyze the results of two high school students on DBS Parkinson's patients and to reveal their thoughts on its future usability.

Materials and Methods: The study was carried out with the prospective evaluation of Parkinson’s patients who had DBS surgery in the  Neurosurgery clinic of our hospital between  August 2021 and July 2022.

Results: DBS surgery was performed in 18 patients. Due to the deaths of three of these patients during the trial, they were not included in the analysis. In addition, 4 patients who were not able to be reached did not request post-operative follow-ups. There was a statistically significant increase in the study group's post-procedure SF 36 scale score changes for the physical function (p:0.001), physical role difficulty (p:0.008), pain (p:0.042), general health (p:0.003), and social functionality (p:0.004) subscales. Energy/aliveness/vitality, emotional role difficulty, and mental health subscale scores did not significantly correlate with one another (p>0.05). The amounts of change in the SF-36 subscale scores were found to be statistically equivalent when the distribution of the change in post-procedure scores by gender was investigated (p>0.05). A significant and adverse correlation between the change in the general health subscale score and age was discovered when the relationship between SF-36 subscale scores and age were investigated (Rho: -0.681, p:0.021). Age and the change in other subscale scores were not correlated statistically significantly (p>0.05).

Conclusions: In the comparison of 11 Parkinson's patients treated with DBS with SF-36 form before and after DBS, physical function, physical role difficulty, pain, general health, and social functionality increased at a certain level after DBS and were found to be statistically significant.