Advanced Therapeutic Options for Parkinson Disease and Essential Tremor: Anvi Gadani, MD

WATCH TIME: 5 minutes

"We focused on deep brain stimulation, which is one of our main go-to therapies now for our patients with advanced Parkinson and essential tremor. You can target the deep structures in the brain that can contribute to these disease processes and stimulate with high-frequency modulatory therapy. This helps manage these more advanced patients that have had significant disease progression and all the other oral medication therapies have started to become of limited benefit to them."

Levodopa is known as the most efficacious drug for a majority of patients with Parkinson disease (PD) and is recommended to be used as primary approach to control troublesome tremor.¹ Despite levodopa optimization, deep brain stimulation (DBS) and focused ultrasound are considered first-line therapies for patients with drug-refractory PD tremor. Another highly effective therapy for medication-refractory tremor is surgery, but mostly in selected patients without motor fluctuations. These therapies require appropriate utilization and success them may depend on both the provider and the patient.

At the 3rd Annual Advanced Therapeutics in Movement and Related Disorders (ATMRD) Congress, held by the PMD Alliance from June 22-25, 2024, Anvi Gadani, MD, presented a talk reviewing how various therapeutic delivery systems and surgical management options such as DBS, pump therapy, and focused ultrasound impact the management of PD, essential tremor (ET), and dystonia. In her talk, Gadani presented how clinicians can communicate to their patients about the different types of treatments available, while comparing the benefits and risks, to manage their movement disorder.

Gadani, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital, sat down with NeurologyLive^® at the Congress to discuss the primary benefits and risks of deep brain stimulation for patients with PD and ET. Additionally, she spoke about how MRI-guided focused ultrasound differs from DBS in terms of invasiveness and therapeutic approach. Moreover, Gadani, who also serves as a neurologist in the department of movement disorders at Montgomery Medical Center, talked about the emerging device-aided therapies in development, and how close they are to reaching clinical settings.

Click here for more coverage of ATMRD 2024.

REFERENCES
1. Pirker W, Katzenschlager R, Hallett M, Poewe W. Pharmacological Treatment of Tremor in Parkinson's Disease Revisited. J Parkinsons Dis. 2023;13(2):127-144. doi:10.3233/JPD-225060