This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Medical Practice  • Medical Ethics  • Neurology  • Deep Brain Stimulation  • Movement Disorders  • Pain  • Psychiatry  • Depression  • Quality of Care  • Patient Safety/ Medical Error  • Surgery  • Surgical Interventions  • Neurosurgery  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Avoiding the Errors of Psychosurgery

Morten L. Kringelbach, DPhil; Tipu Z. Aziz, DMedSci

JAMA. 2009;301(16):1705-1707.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Since the publication of Whitman's prescient poem "I Sing the Body Electric" in his collection Leaves of Grass, the electrical nature of brain and body has been confirmed by an abundance of scientific research. Seemingly much of what goes wrong with the brain could hypothetically benefit from finely calibrated pulses of electricity. The most promising available neuromodulatory technique is deep brain stimulation (DBS), which has shown clinical efficacy and safety in helping to improve certain brain-related problems such as movement disorders.¹ The improvement in the symptoms of many patients has captured the attention of the general public, and neuroscientists are now introducing DBS for treatment of psychiatric disorders such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Despite this sense of great expectancy, it is important to proceed with a combination of humility and hubris. Because neurosurgery to the brain is tinkering with the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Efficacy and Safety of DBS

Author Affiliations: Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom (Dr Kringelbach); Centre for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (Dr Kringelbach); and Nuffield Department of Surgery, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, United Kingdom (Drs Kringelbach and Aziz).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?