The lab is currently working on two big projects.
Current projects
Non-invasive personalised neurostimulation for Parkinson’s disease
In this MRC funded project, we aim to develop novel brain-activity based neurostimulation strategies for Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s causes a wide range of symptoms that vary strongly between individuals. Patients are burdened with different combinations of symptoms, including tremor, slowness, muscle cramps, walking difficulties and even impulsivity, and would thus benefit from a personalised therapeutic approach.
The two currently leading therapies are dopaminergic medication and deep brain stimulation (DBS), which can be highly effective in the early and middle stages of the disease. However, high medication doses in later stages can cause side effects including hallucinations, impulsivity, and excessive uncontrollable movements, called dyskinesia. DBS can deliver personalized therapies and minimize side effects as it can theoretically be programmed to adjust to symptom fluctuations. However, DBS requires invasive surgery and can cause memory problems if patients already show signs of cognitive impairment, and is thus available to only few patients (~10%).
Non-invasive neurostimulation (i.e. not requiring surgery, but for involving electrical stimulation through pads strapped to the head) can also be personalized and could be more cost-effective and more accessible than DBS if effective protocols were developed. Our aim is to develop novel personalized non-invasive neurostimulation protocols for Parkinson’s to improve both motor and cognitive abilities beyond what existing therapies achieve. We will approach this by characterizing in detail how brain areas communicate with each other when they work at their best both in terms of motor and cognitive abilities in individual patients. People with Parkinson’s reportedly feel at their best after engaging in intense physical exercise, and some even report they intermittently feel they do not have Parkinson’s at all. We will capitalize on the striking acute benefits of exercise to identify which brain activity and functional connectivity patterns should be promoted in individual participants. We will then program non-invasive neurostimulation tools to restore the identified patterns and test how effective our stimulation strategies are in improving individual symptoms. By orchestrating stimulation across multiple brain areas we hope to maximize the clinical benefits.
Somatosensory stimulation to improve dystonia
Dystonia is a movement disorder characterized by involuntary muscle contractions. Currently available treatments often provide only partial relief or may even be ineffective in some cases. Recent research has identified neural activity patterns that are associated with dystonia symptom severity. We are testing whether somatosensory stimulation in the form of brief vibration pulses that specifically target these neural activity patterns can improve symptoms of idiopathic focal dystonia. To date we found that our protocol could alleviate symptoms in the majority of our research participants, with some reporting superior improvements to conventional treatments. Our next steps will be to 1) record more neural data to gain a better understanding of the brain activity changes underlying the symptom improvements, and 2) build a mobile setup and undertake long-term tests over multiple weeks to test if the beneficial effects can be retained or even be enhanced after repeated use.
Both projects have been initiated to step away from a one-fits-all approach towards personalised neurostimulation, which shows great promise in transforming the treatment options for Parkinson’s, dystonia and other movement disorders.
We would like to thank our current and previous funders including the MRC (Medical Research Council), the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) via the CloseNIT Network Plus, the Rosetrees Trust and the Stoneygate Trust.
Lab equipment
Our lab has high-end EEG recording and neurostimulation devices:
- 64-channels ANT Neuro eego sport mobile EEG
- Soterix Medical MxN-17 PRO HD transcranial electrical neurostimulator
- PulsePal 2
- Behavioural recording devices (optical encoders, graphics tablets, EMGs, accelerometers, GSR sensors)
The Psychological Sciences department of the University of Bristol also has a transcranial focussed ultrasound neurostimulation device and as member of the GW4 we can also access the CUBRIC brain imaging facilities at Cardiff.