Essential tremor affects 10 to 20 million Americans. It can become very disabling.
People call us from all over the world because they've been dealing with tremor for
decades or sometimes all their life. And we can sometimes stop it really within minutes.
So, when I was probably around 50-51 I started noticing the tremor. You know
I have to try to do everything with one hand because my right hand I can't do much with it.
My doctor mentioned to me that there was an ultrasound treatment here in Charlottesville.
There have been treatments but these were open surgeries that involved drilling a hole in the skull to
insert an electrode. Beginning around 2010 UVA gained access to this focused
ultrasound technology and the real advance here is the ability to do the treatment
without any incision while someone's wide awake to confirm and validate that we've done the treatment.
Hoping that i'll live a more normal life. Like I said there's just so many things I can't do. People come
in on the day of the procedure to this facility. We conduct one final baseline test of their tremor.
Once we have the patient prepared we take them into the MRI room, we focus the ultrasound
transducer exactly where we want it based on the MRI. It has 1,024 individual ultrasound elements
that are all computer controlled. We can bring all those thousand beams into an extremely sharp
focus deep inside of the brain within a millimeter or so. We'll prescribe a small dose of ultrasound
and then we go check the patient and their clinical function and if everything looks good
we repeat it and we tiptoe it up until their tremor's safely gone.
How about straight out?
How about, yeah.
How about straight up?
Touch my finger. And then your chin.
It's awesome. I haven't done that in a long time. Really each case is a thrill and it
never gets old. This whole event has been very gratifying. It led to
kind of a worldwide approval and acceptance of the technology. So, it really paved the way
for thinking about ultrasound technology for neurologic and psychiatric disorders.