Deep Brain Stimulation May Help Parkinson’s Patients Drive

According to a new study recently published in the online issue of Neurology, deep brain stimulation may benefit the driving ability of people with Parkinson’s disease. Using driving simulation in the experiment, the study involved those with deep brain stimulators, those with Parkinson’s disease who did not have stimulators and a group who did not have Parkinson’s disease, all of whom had been driving at least once a week for more than 30 minutes within the previous three years. “Up until now, we weren’t sure how deep brain stimulation would affect driving,” said study author Carsten Buhmann, MD, of University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany. Evaluating driving errors, the people with Parkinson’s without stimulators performed worse than the control participants in every category except one, while the people with deep brain stimulators did not perform significantly worse than the controls in any category, even performing better in the category of slight errors. Click here to read the full article.