When NFL legend Brett Favre recently announced his Parkinson’s diagnosishe raised awareness of the degenerative disease, for which there is no cure and no known cause.
But researchers are making progress in therapies for Parkinson’s and essential tremor, an even more common movement disorder that affects as many as 10 million people in the US. CBS News Chicago spoke with a patient at Northwestern Medicine who was the first in the Chicago area to try one of their new procedures.
“Miracle” is a word Chuck Wicks has been using a lot lately, less than two months after a procedure that stopped the tremors in his right hand.
“It’s gone,” Wicks, an essential tremor patient. “It’s an absolute miracle.”
Wicks has suffered from a condition called essential tremor his entire adult life, but a video taken just two hours after undergoing a “focused ultrasound” procedure put an end to the tremors in his right hand.
“It’s a miracle,” Wicks said in that video.
He said he recently decided to investigate possible therapies.
“I just decided to bite the bullet,” Wicks said. “What have I got to lose?”
He discovered that the procedure would be covered by his Medicare plan.
“How they ever determined where this spot was in the brain is astonishing,” Wicks said. “I wish that whole technology had been around already. I could have done it 25 years ago.”
Dr. Joshua Rosenow is on the team that performed the non-invasive procedure, which uses sound waves to target the part of Wicks’ brain that caused the tremors, a procedure that has been around for years, but Northwestern Medicine is one of the few systems in the world. the country offering it.
Rosenow said some patients are reluctant to sign up for other tremor treatments, including deep brain surgery to implant an electrode.
“You think about how far Parkinson’s research has come since Michael J. Fox went public in the 1990s,” Rosenow said. “There has been a huge change in the way we look at Parkinson’s. Essential tremor, Mr. Wicks’ problem, is actually a more common movement disorder than Parkinson’s, but is much more undertreated both medically and surgically than Parkinson’s.”
Wicks said the procedures changed the way he does the little things in life, like playing pool and writing.
“Now that it’s done, it’s almost like it’s always been this way,” he said. “It’s great.”
Wicks said the procedure went so well that he is considering having it done on the other side, although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires patients to wait at least nine months between the two procedures.
