Stuart Isaacson, MD: Patient Perspective On Essential Tremor Treatment

“Some patients are willing to take the risk—a small risk, but a risk—of brain surgery, or there’s deep brain stimulation’s or focused ultrasound’s risk, when some don’t want to take those risks.”

Essential tremor, while common and often impactful on patients’ daily lives, does feature a number of invasive and noninvasive interventions in its arsenal of care. Ranging from surgery to deep brain stimulation (DBS) or focused ultrasound (FUS), there are options for patients outside of physical therapy or oral medications.

In a discussion with NeurologyLive, Stuart Isaacson, MD, director, Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center of Boca Raton, spoke to the patient perspective on making the decision to utilize any one intervention over another, much of which boils down to the risk—albeit small in most cases—that the patient is willing to take.

Isaacson also provided an overview of these minimally invasive surgical techniques, such as DBS and FUS, and their use in essential tremor, as well as some other methods which have begun to be explored in trials in recent years.