New treatment helps manage tremors

Imagine your body turning into shaky branches in a breeze, with small tremors growing into a constant struggle.

For the over 10 million people with essential tremors, this storm can make everyday tasks like eating and walking feel impossible.

Janice Pedersen has a lot to live for: 11 kids and 52 grandkids, to be exact, but even before the grandkids, Janice noticed her hands starting to shake. That’s when she was treated with MRI-guided high-frequency focused ultrasound.

“Using sound waves that get through the brain and create that, sort of, thermal heating, in the area that we’re trying to negate the activity,” said Emory University neurosurgeon Robert Gross.

Gross can now pinpoint the tiniest area in the brain causing the tremors.

“It’s guided by an MRI scan,” he said.

Using the same type of ultrasound that breaks up kidney stones and allows you to see babies in utero, this one uses a thousand ultrasound beams to ablate or destroy the lesions in the brain, causing the tremors.

“We focus those thousand beams such that, as they’re going through, they don’t do very much heating at any particular trajectory through the brain, but they all meet at a certain point,” Gross said.

The FDA-approved procedure is now offered all over the country and is helping people like Pedersen regain control of their lives.

The treatment is performed in a single session and usually takes two to three hours.

It’s being used for patients living with essential tremors or Parkinson’s-related tremors that are not responding to medication.

Data so far shows the effect of the procedure lasts up to five years or longer.