Symptoms of Parkinson’s disease such as the involuntary movements may be effectively countered by deep brain stimulation.
St. Jude Medical (NYSE:STJ), the Minnesota maker of new innovative medical devices, reported that PD patients who underwent the company’s deep brain stimulation therapy had longer symptom-free periods than those who did not receive it. The data represents the company’s first controlled study designed to see how patients undergoing neurostimulation fared.
Currently, the company’s Libra and LibraXP deep brain deep brain stimulation systems are available internationally, but not in the U.S.
The St. Jude study was conducted at 15 medical centers in the U.S. and involved 136 patients. Results showed that those who received the therapy had an average increase of 4.7 hours in which they did not show dyskinesia, which are the involuntary movements caused by medications used to manage the condition. That compares to an increase of 1.77 hours among the control group that did not receive deep brain stimulation.
The results of the study were published in the Lancet Neurology Journal.
“These results are important as they represent the first large, randomized, controlled study of a constant current device for managing the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease,” said Dr. Michael Okun, administrative director of the University Of Florida College Of Medicine’s Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration, national medical director for the National Parkinson Foundation and the primary author of the article, in a St. Jude news release.
Other results were:
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
- Motor scores for those in the stimulation group improved 39 percent compared to the baseline as measured by the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS).
- There was a statistically significant decrease in the amount of medications needed to control PD symptoms in the stimulation group compared to the group without stimulation.
